Risk Adjustment and Accountable Care

In the context of the new, evolving entities like accountable care organizations, the fundamental premise, in terms of why we hope those organizations will be successful, is that they're based on providers working together, trying to achieve better outcomes, trying to achieve greater efficiency. And part of that is, as savings are achieved, that those savings will be shared among the individual providers, this notion of shared savings. Well, in order to do that fairly and accurately, you need to risk adjust the caseload of each individual provider. So risk adjustment becomes absolutely crucial.