Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have signed a four-year agreement with Iasist of Barcelona, Spain, which will give Iasist distribution rights to the JHU Adjusted Clinical Groups® Case-Mix System (ACG System) in Spain and Portugal. Iasist is currently assisting the Basque National Health Service (Osakidetza) in using the ACG System to allocate resources among primary care clinics.
Developed by the Bloomberg School Public Health, the ACG System is a computer-based algorithm that assesses the health of people enrolled in a given health plan or health system. The plans, in turn, use the ACG System to help predict the need for their future health care services. Adjusted Clinical Groups (ACGs) are a series of mutually exclusive, health-status categories that are defined by morbidity, age and gender. They are based on the premise that the level of resources necessary for delivering appropriate health care to a population is correlated to the illness burden of that population. The ACG System is used to assess provider performance, identify future high-cost cases and develop innovative plan payment and financial risk-sharing arrangements by more than 175 health care organizations worldwide.