TITLE:
Accountable Care Organization: Is It Early Approach in Saudi Arabia?
AUTHORS:
Abeer M. Alharbi, Ghaliah A. Nassar, Mariam Alerwi, Amjad S. Aljelban, Ahmed Alslaihim, Bander Alshehri, Anwar Alenezi, Salem Alsuwaidan
KEYWORDS:
Accountable Care Organization (ACO), National Transformation Program (NTP), Saudi Vision 2030, Primary Healthcare Center (PHC), Health Clusters, Knowledge, Attitude and Confidence (KAC)
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Industrial and Business Management,
Vol.12 No.11,
November
30,
2022
ABSTRACT: Accountable
Care Organization (ACO) is trying to evolve all around the world moving towards and keeping cost-effective
at a minimum, providing a better quality of care and improving health outcomes in a
patient-centered manner, adopting technology to
organize and coordinate care between health care network, primary health care
and hospitals to facilitate care and management, monitoring, and reporting
quality and cost data to track patient across health care providers by allowing
access to patient electronic medical file, and avoiding duplication of services and prevent medical
errors. Objectives and Aims: The main objectives of this study is to
find out the association of demographic data and the level of knowledge,
attitude and confidence of the physicians of various age, gender, specialty, area of work and
their clinical and administrative field experiences. This is to assess the
ability to establish a successful basement to build a new trend in healthcare system “Accountable
Care Organizations” (ACOs) in Saudi Arabia. Results: This prospective and cross-sectional study was
conducted on 321 physicians with an average age of 42.8 ± 11 SD. Results showed the average score for
knowledge of all respondents was 65.2 out of 100 with ±15.7 SD. The overall
average of the modes of the attitude was 6.8 out of 10; While the overall
average of the modes of the confidence was 5.9 out of 10. Conclusion: This study was
conducted to assess physicians’ knowledge, attitude and confidence toward implementation of ACO in Saudi
Arabia. The current study suggested that there was no significant difference
between the level of knowledge of ACOs between males and females and between the specialties (consultant,
specialist, or resident). Results showed that there was no significant
difference in attitude between males and females neither there was a significant difference between different specialties consultants,
specialists and residents. Moreover, those physicians with administrative
experience had better attitudes towards
ACO than those with clinical experience. Males showed higher confidence compared with females.
There were similarities in results with no significant changes between
consultants, specialists and residents with predominantly average mode of what
is considered as moderate confidence. This study is confirming that Saudi
Arabia is ready for the transformation and vision of 2030 to adopt the ACO
health care system with this knowledge, attitude and confidence of the Saudi
physicians.