2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule: A Practical Breakdown for ACOs & APM Participants

Every year, the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule sets the terms for how physicians get paid. The 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule is worth closer attention than usual. It introduced a structural change that has not existed before: two different conversion factors depending on how a physician participates in Medicare payment models. For ACOs, APM participants, and physician groups, the practical implications go beyond the rate change itself.

Two Conversion Factors for the First Time

Starting in 2026, CMS set two separate conversion factors. One applies to qualifying APM participants. The other applies to everyone else.

Qualifying APM participants received a conversion factor update of +0.75%, while non-qualifying APM participants received +0.25%.

The final conversion factor for qualifying APM participants landed at $33.5675, up 3.77% from 2025. For non-APM participants, it sits at $33.4009, a 3.26% increase. 

The dollar difference between these two figures is not dramatic on its own. What matters is the structure. CMS has now formalized a payment advantage for APM participation, and there is no indication the gap narrows in future years.

What Changed for ACOs in MSSP

Several changes in the 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule affect how MSSP ACOs operate day to day:

• CMS reduced the time an ACO can participate in a one-sided risk track from seven years to five, moving organizations toward downside risk arrangements on a shorter timeline.
• The health equity adjustment on ACO quality scores has been removed starting in 2026 and replaced with a population adjustment
• The definition of primary care services used for beneficiary attribution has been expanded
• Patient matching requirements for Medicare CQM reporting have been simplified to reduce reporting burden

For ACOs sitting in one-sided risk tracks, the shorter runway means the transition planning needs to start sooner.

Quality Reporting Under the 2026 Fee Schedule

The 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule continues the push toward electronic clinical quality measure reporting. MSSP ACOs must report under the APP Plus quality measure set, which adds more required measures each year through 2028.

For MIPS participants, the performance threshold holds at 75 points through 2028, which gives organizations some predictability for planning. The quality measure inventory saw five new additions, ten removals, and updates to several existing measures.

Promoting Interoperability is now a required reporting category for all MSSP ACO participants regardless of which track they are in.

What APM Participants Should Note

The higher conversion factor for qualifying APM participants is one part of a broader set of advantages. Organizations that qualify as Advanced APM participants also receive:

• Exemption from standard MIPS reporting requirements
• Automatic credit for Improvement Activities
• A higher base conversion factor than non-APM participants

The higher rate for APM participants reflects CMS's clear preference for providers taking on risk through value-based care arrangements. 

For physician groups weighing whether to join an ACO or move into an Advanced APM, the payment differential in 2026 adds a financial consideration alongside the clinical and operational ones.

Conclusion

The 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule makes the financial advantage of APM participation concrete for the first time with a formalized rate difference. At the same time, ACO quality reporting requirements are expanding, risk timelines are compressing, and Promoting Interoperability is now mandatory across MSSP tracks. Organizations managing these requirements across multiple contracts and provider groups need infrastructure that keeps quality reporting, risk tracking, and performance monitoring current throughout the year.

Persivia's platform supports ACOs and physician groups across MSSP, ACO REACH, and other value-based programs, with quality measure tracking, risk stratification, and performance reporting running in one connected platform. For organizations working through what the 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule means for their operations, see how it helps manage the moving parts.

7 ACO Success Strategies Every Medical Director Should Know

Medical directors in ACOs carry both clinical and financial responsibility. Quality scores, shared savings targets, care gap rates, total cost of care: all of it runs through leadership decisions. The ACOs consistently hitting their benchmarks are not working harder than the ones that are not. They have clearer ACO success strategies and the operational structure to follow through on them. Here are seven that show up repeatedly in high-performing organizations.

1. Know Your Population Before the Year Begins

Before the performance year starts, the care team needs a clear view of which patients need the most attention, which conditions are unmanaged, and where care gaps already exist. That picture has to be current. Patient data changes constantly, and a risk assessment from three months ago may not reflect where a patient stands today.

2. Build Structure Around Post-Discharge Follow-Up

Readmissions are largely a coordination problem, not a clinical one. What happens between discharge and the first follow-up visit determines whether a patient stabilizes or returns. A follow-up plan, medication review, and monitoring schedule need to be confirmed before the patient leaves, not scheduled later when someone has time.

When post-discharge steps depend on someone remembering to initiate them, patients slip through. A reliable process moves on its own once discharge happens.

3. Close Care Gaps During the Year

Care gaps need to reach the right person while there is still time to act on them. A gap flagged in a report that nobody checks weekly is not a functioning alert system. Prompts during provider visits and timely patient outreach are what actually move gap closure rates.

An ACO that starts addressing gaps in the final quarter of the year has very little room to recover lost ground on quality measures.

4. Eliminate Redundant Services

When providers lack access to a complete patient record, they order tests and procedures that have already been done elsewhere. The patient gets billed twice, and the ACO absorbs the cost at reconciliation. Giving every provider a shared view of what has already happened is the most direct way to reduce this.

5. Monitor Network Utilization

Care delivered outside the ACO network often goes untracked until reconciliation. By that point, there is no opportunity to coordinate or prevent follow-on costs. Keeping visibility into where attributed patients receive care throughout the year is part of managing the total cost of care.

6. Align Provider Incentives With Contract Goals

Providers operating under fee-for-service logic will continue to prioritize volume unless their compensation reflects something different. Tying performance metrics to pay is what shifts daily clinical behavior toward the outcomes a value-based contract requires.

7. Track Quality Measures Throughout the Year

Quality performance reviewed only at year's end leaves no room to respond. Tracking measures throughout the year means a team can address a gap falling short in June rather than finding out in December when nothing can be done. HEDIS, STAR ratings, and HCC coding accuracy all need to be visible while there is still time to act.

Conclusion

These ACO success strategies require more than good intentions. They require a system where the right information gets to the right person while action is still possible. Clinical staff and leadership can only act on what they can see, and they can only act in time if the process does not depend on manual steps to move forward.

Persivia's CareSpace® supports each of these strategies inside one connected platform, covering risk stratification, post-discharge monitoring, care gap management, quality tracking, and network utilization reporting for ACOs running MSSP, ACO REACH, and other value-based programs. See how CareSpace® supports ACO performance.

Digital Health Platforms: Past Challenges and What Comes Next

Healthcare has spent decades buying technology that promised more than it delivered. Systems went in, costs went up, and care teams ended up managing the tools instead of the patients. A Digital Health Platform in 2026 looks nothing like what got sold under that name ten years ago. The difference is worth understanding, both for what went wrong before and for what is actually working now.

What Early Digital Health Got Wrong

Early digital health tools were built to solve one problem at a time. A hospital would have one system for documentation, another for billing, another for outreach, and another for quality reporting. None of them shared data cleanly. Care teams spent as much time moving information between systems as they did using it.

The tools were not necessarily bad. The problem was that they were never designed to work together. Each solved its own problem and stopped there, leaving organizations with a collection of systems and no coherent way to operate across them.

The Data Problem That Kept Coming Back

Social determinants barely made it into the picture. Care managers pulled together whatever they could find from whichever system they had access to that day and made decisions from there. By the time the right information reached the right person, the window to act had often already closed. Connecting all of that data turned out to be a much harder problem than it looked.

Every organization accumulates patient data. Very little of it was usable in real time. Records sat in systems that could not talk to each other. Claims lived separately from clinical data. Digital health platforms were supposed to fix this. Early versions tried. But the integration work proved harder than product roadmaps suggested.

What Changed and Why It Matters Now

Interoperability Moved From Optional to Required

For years, data sharing between systems depended on custom integrations built case by case. That changed when FHIR-based standards moved into enforcement. Interoperability standards, including FHIR R4/R5, USCDI+, and TEFCA, have moved from encouragement to enforcement, accelerating modernization across care settings. 

When data can actually move between systems reliably, a Digital Health Platform can do what it was always supposed to: give care teams a complete, current view of a patient regardless of where care was received.

The Shift From Point Solutions to Unified Platforms

Organizations stopped looking for the best tool for each task and started looking for one environment that handled all of them. The shift happened because the cost of managing multiple disconnected vendors, each with its own data format and integration requirements, became too high.

That shift matters because the problems healthcare organizations face are not isolated. Risk stratification connects to care management. Care management connects to quality reporting. Quality reporting connects to reimbursement. A platform that handles one piece well but requires manual work to connect the others does not solve the underlying problem.

What a Modern Digital Health Platform Actually Does

A modern Digital Health Platform is not a dashboard. It is an operating environment for care delivery.

A current patient record built from EHRs, claims, labs, and social data. Risk scores that update as new information comes in. Care gaps that surface where clinicians are already working, not in a separate tab. Quality measure performance is tracked throughout the year, not just at submission time.

The ones that actually work were built to connect from day one. They did not start as a single-use tool and expand outward. They started with the assumption that data comes from everywhere and needs to end up in one place.

Where Digital Health Platforms Are Heading

AI That Does More Than Flag

AI in early digital health platforms mostly flagged things: a potential risk, a possible gap. The next step is not just identifying a problem. It is doing something about it automatically. Routing outreach, updating care plans, and filling documentation gaps: these used to require a person to connect the dots. Platforms handling this directly are where the real-time savings show up for care teams.

Modular Architecture That Adapts

A large health system and a small ACO do not need the same setup. Platforms that can be configured to fit how an organization actually works, without a full rebuild every time something changes, hold up better as contracts and regulations shift. That flexibility is what separates a platform organization from one that they eventually replace.

Conclusion

Digital health has a long history of tools that worked in demos and fell short in practice. The gap between a promising product and something a care team actually uses every day has always been the hard part. What is different now is that the infrastructure, data standards, integration capabilities, and clinical workflow design have caught up enough that the gap is finally closable for organizations willing to make the right platform choice.

The CareSpace® Digital Health Platform from Persivia has been doing exactly this work for nearly two decades, across more than 200 hospitals and 20 million patients. It connects clinical and claims data, continuously runs risk stratification, surfaces care gaps at the point ofcare, and tracks quality and financial performance in one place. Fororganizations looking at where digital health platforms actually deliver on their promise, see what CareSpace® covers.

Population Healthcare Analytics for ACOs: The Metrics That Actually Move Outcomes

ACOs sit on more data than they know what to do with. The challenge has never been collecting it. It is figuring out which numbers actually connect to patient outcomes and financial performance, and getting those numbers to the right people while there is still time to act. Population Healthcare Analytics is how high-performing ACOs close that gap. For organizations running MSSP, ACO REACH, or other risk contracts, the difference between hitting and missing a shared savings target often comes down to which metrics the care team is tracking and how quickly they can respond.

What Population Healthcare Analytics Actually Means for ACOs

Population Healthcare Analytics turns clinical and claims data into patterns a care team can do something with: which patients are headed toward hospitalization, which providers have high ED utilization, and where costs are running above benchmark three months into the performance year.

Most ACOs are not short on reports. They are short on reports that reach the right person soon enough to change what happens next.

The Metrics That Show Up in High-Performing ACOs

Some metrics look useful, but never connect to a decision. Others sit behind the financial and quality performance of every ACO that consistently hits its targets. Here is what that second group actually tracks.

Risk Stratification Scores

Risk stratification identifies which patients are heading toward high-cost events before those events happen. It works by pulling together clinical history, recent claims, lab results, and social factors into a score that updates as conditions change. A patient managing three chronic conditions who missed two recent follow-ups looks different from one whose care is on track, and the score should reflect that difference in real time, not at the next reporting cycle.

ED Utilization and Avoidable Admissions

Emergency visits and inpatient stays account for a significant share of ACO costs. Tracking these by patient, provider, and care site shows where utilization is concentrated. When one provider's panel drives a disproportionate share of ED visits, that is a specific target. General awareness that utilization is high does not lead to action. Knowing where and why does.

Care Gap Closure Rates

A care gap left open is two problems at once: a patient whose condition is not being monitored and a quality measure that will not close. Tracking how many gaps get closed, by which care managers, across which programs, shows where the outreach process is holding up and where patients are consistently not getting reached. That distinction matters because the fix is different in each case.

Cost and Utilization Patterns

Cost/utilization analytics connects spending to specific care patterns. Which patient groups are running costs above contract benchmarks? Where is post-acute spending higher than expected? Are referrals leaving the network when in-network options exist? A population healthcare analytics solution tracking this through the performance year lets leadership adjust before the year closes, not after.

Readmission Rates

When a patient returns within 30 days of discharge, something in the transition process did not work. Tracking readmissions by diagnosis, discharge destination, and whether a follow-up visit happened shows where the breakdown occurred. That is a different and more useful picture than a single readmission rate at year-end.

Why Most Analytics Fall Short

The gap between analytics that generate reports and analytics that change outcomes usually comes down to timing and workflow. Numbers reviewed once a month show what happened. A population healthcare analytics solution that updates as new data comes in shows what is happening now, when something can still be done about it.

The second issue is where the data lives. Analytics in a separate system from care management requires someone to manually connect the two. By the time a flag reaches a care coordinator, the opportunity may already be gone. When analytics feed directly into care management workflows, the data becomes action without an extra step.

What Strong Analytics Infrastructure Covers

For ACOs, a cost/utilization analytics setup worth running includes:

• Risk scores that refresh as new clinical and claims data arrive
• ED and admission tracking at the patient and provider level
• Care gap performance by measure, site, and contract
• Cost and utilization benchmarks compared against contract targets throughout the year
• Readmission monitoring with post-discharge follow-up built in

Each of these ties directly to the financial and quality metrics an ACO is accountable for. Tracking them in one connected place, updated regularly, is what makes population healthcare analytics operationally useful rather than just informational.

Conclusion

ACOs consistently hitting their performance targets are not working from better instincts. They have a clearer, more current picture of their population, and that picture reaches the people responsible for acting on it before the window closes. Analytics sitting in quarterly reports do not drive outcomes. Analytics connected to daily care workflows do.

That connection between data and action is what a well-built population healthcare analytics solution makes possible. Persivia's CareSpace® covers risk stratification, cost and utilization tracking, care gap performance, and quality measure reporting in one place, with analytics flowing directly into care management workflows. For ACOs looking to close the gap between the data they have and the outcomes they are accountable for, see what CareSpace® covers.

Care Management Software for ACOs: Must-Have Capabilities in 2026

ACOs are under more pressure than ever. With CMS pushing organizations toward two-sided risk faster than most are ready for, and quality reporting requirements getting tighter every cycle, the Care Management Software an ACO runs on is not a background decision anymore. It directly affects shared savings performance, quality scores, and whether care teams can keep up with a growing attributed population. Here is what the software actually needs to do in 2026 to be worth the investment.

What ACOs Actually Need from Care Management Software

ACO care teams handle a lot at once: finding patients who need attention, following up on gaps, keeping providers in the loop, managing care transitions, and reporting on quality measures, often across multiple contracts. Most are doing this across several tools that were never meant to work together, which means a lot of time goes into coordination that the Care Management Software should be handling. Good software does not just organize the work. It moves it forward without someone manually pushing every step.

The Capabilities That Matter in 2026

Risk Stratification That Runs Continuously

A patient can be discharged, readmitted, and back home before a monthly report even runs. Risk scores need to stay current, updating as new labs, claims, and EHR entries come in, so care managers are working from today's picture, not last month's.

Static lists go stale. Real-time stratification is what keeps high-risk patients from falling through the cracks.

Multi-Payer Contract Management in One View

Running MSSP and ACO REACH at the same time, alongside a Medicare Advantage or commercial agreement, means tracking different measures and deadlines for each one. When those live in separate tools, something always gets missed. One view covering all active contracts keeps the whole team on the same page without anyone manually bridging the gaps.

Care Gap Tracking and Closure

Finding a gap means nothing if it never reaches the right person. It needs to land in the care manager's existing workflow, not in a separate system they have to remember to check. There also needs to be a clear record of whether it was actually closed, because at year's end, open gaps show up as missed HEDIS measures.

Point-of-Care Alerts and Provider Engagement

The provider sitting with a patient is often the best person to close a care gap on the spot. If the Care Management Platform only sends information to the back-office team, that moment is gone. Alerts that show up during the visit, flagging overdue screenings or missing documentation, get acted on far more often than ones that arrive in a report later.

Care Transitions and Post-Discharge Monitoring

Most readmissions come down to a gap in follow-up. The patient leaves, everyone assumes the next person is handling it, and nothing happens until the patient is back in the ED. Post-discharge outreach needs to go out automatically, with tasks assigned and the patient tracked until the transition is properly closed. Care Management for ACOs needs that structure built in, not assembled manually each time someone is discharged.

Quality Reporting Built Into the Workflow

HEDIS measures, HCC coding, eCQM submissions: these should come out of the care work already being done, not require a separate project at the end of each quarter. When reporting means a manual pull, it is always incomplete and always late. The Care Management Platform needs to generate that reporting from the same data that care teams are already working with every day.

Implementation Speed Is Part of the Decision Too

An ACO signing a new contract in January cannot wait until fall to have its platform running. How fast a team can get up and going matters as much as the feature list.

PMC ACO went from contract signing to live in under 30 days, with custom forms and workflows set up in about a week and care managers trained in a single day. That kind of timeline is what organizations working under real contract pressure need.

What the Strongest Platforms Have in Common

The ACOs hitting their benchmarks right now are not running the most tools. They picked one platform that covers the full picture and got their teams working from the same system. A few things show up consistently in the ones that hold up:

• Risk stratification that updates without anyone running a manual process
• Care gaps that surface inside daily workflows, not in a separate system
• Post-discharge monitoring that runs automatically, not by memory
• Multi-contract visibility in one place
• Quality reporting that builds from existing clinical activity

Final Call

Persivia's CareSpace® covers all of it. Clinical and claims data connected into one record, risk stratification that stays current, care gaps surfaced at the point of care, multiple contracts tracked in one place, and quality reporting that does not require a manual process at quarter-end. For ACOs in MSSP, ACO REACH, or any other value-based program working to hit benchmarks without adding to their team's load, see what this platform does.