How value-based care enables better clinical outcomes, primary care sustainability

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The U.S. health care system fundamentally rewards treating disease instead of prevention. In 2023, health care spending in the U.S. reached $4.9 trillion annually — $14,570 per person.¹ While costs continue to rise, primary care practices face increasing pressure to balance patient care with business sustainability. Administrative workloads compound this challenge, leaving physicians with less time for actual patient care.

Value-based care offers a path forward. By rewarding proactive and preventive care rather than reactive treatments, this model allows clinicians to focus on helping patients maintain wellness through high-impact interventions like blood pressure monitoring and chronic condition management. This prevention-focused structure enables primary care organizations to achieve financial sustainability while reducing burnout and improving quality.

Value-based care delivers results

The 2024 Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) results prove that value-based care is transformational for patients and physicians, by achieving the highest rate of shared savings since the inception of the program. The program achieved unprecedented success, generating $2.5 billion in Medicare savings while distributing $4.1 billion in shared savings to participating physicians. An impressive 75% of accountable care organizations (ACOs) earned performance payments, demonstrating the viability of this model for primary care organizations across the country.²

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), ACOs have not only increased financial outcomes, but patient outcomes as well.

• ACOs had higher savings per capita in 2024 compared to 2023: $245 vs $207 in net per capita savings and $651 vs $515 in gross per capita savings, respectively.²
• The average percentage of beneficiaries with adequately controlled high blood pressure increased significantly from 2023 to 2024 — from 77.80% to 79.49%.

These outcomes represent a health care transformation that prioritizes what matters most: preventing illness, managing chronic conditions effectively and ensuring positive care experiences. Through the additional revenue opportunities, it also provides another model of care that enables primary care physicians to sustain their businesses.

Aledade: the right partner for value-based care success

The key to successfully adopting and succeeding in value-based care is finding the right partner. Aledade, a physician-led national leader in value-based care, helps primary care organizations deliver better patient outcomes and thrive financially through advanced insights, AI-driven technology, personal coaching and policy expertise. Aledade’s physician-led ACOs achieved a 93% success rate in 2024, significantly outperforming the 73% program average.⁴ This performance gap translates directly to sustainability — Aledade partners averaged $390,000 each in shared savings payments in 2024.³

But these results extend far beyond financial metrics. Aledade ACOs delivered measurable improvements in patient care and clinical outcomes:

• 263,000 unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency department visits were prevented, reducing patient stress and system costs³
• Over 800,000 annual wellness visits were conducted, emphasizing prevention over reactive care³
• Delivered significant quality improvements, including a hypertension control rate of 83.3%⁵, 4% higher than the national average³

Aledade enables partners to achieve these results by equipping primary care teams with tools they need to provide more proactive and preventive care. Through Aledade’s technology, expert support, patient outreach solutions and practice operations resources, Aledade enables earlier intervention, smarter care coordination as well as stronger financial and clinical performance, all while reducing administrative workloads.

“Aledade is a very trusted and helpful partner to us, and as someone who uses probably more than 10 population health platforms, it is by far the most sophisticated, most user-friendly,” Meghan Fleck, associate director of value-based care at PentaHealth in Exton, Pennsylvania, said. “It’s integrated with our EHR and has allowed us to offer just such a higher level of care than what we were providing to patients before we had access to it.”

Your path forward: from survival to success

The evidence is clear: value-based care offers primary care organizations a sustainable advantage that addresses today's most pressing challenges. High-quality patient care, reduced administrative workloads and improved financial performance aren't competing goals, they're complementary outcomes of the right partnership approach.

“Value-based care like the kind Aledade … [has] brought to our practice is the path to staying independent. Thanks to the shared savings I’ve earned in value-based care, I’m able to put our small business on a more solid financial footing. We’re able to retire debt. We’re able to pay our staff fair salaries to reward them for the tireless work they do and keep them close in a tight labor market,” Richard Cole, MD, of Patrick County Family Practice in Stuart, Virginia, said. “We can even fix one of the biggest problems that has hit my community and rural communities across the country — hiring more doctors.”

Successful practices discover that focusing on patient outcomes while leveraging appropriate technology and support creates a virtuous cycle: better care leads to healthier patients, reduced costs, increased satisfaction and sustainable profitability. The key lies in partnering with an organization that demonstrates operational excellence, physician-led governance and a track record of supporting primary care success.

Ready to learn how value-based care can help your practice? Let Aledade help.

1. National Health Expenditure Accounts Data, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
2. Medicare Shared Savings Program Accountable Care Organizations Updated Performance Year 2024 Financial and Quality Results
3. Based on internal analysis of data from the 2024 CMS ACO Public Use File.
4. The individual performance of non-Aledade ACOs may be better or worse than the program average.
5. Data is reflective of 2024 PY2+ ACOs only.