About Us
The Accelerator
Built for Impact: The Origins of the
Duke-Margolis & West Health Partnership
The Duke-Margolis & West Health partnership started in 2018 with a simple goal: identifying new pathways for developing and implementing accountable care models that deliver better care at lower costs to more Americans. The partnership initially focused on developing high-level policy roadmaps and analyses to inform CMS and CMMI strategy. The work quickly evolved to tackle deeper, system-level challenges like flawed risk adjustment formulas, insufficient specialty care models, weak mechanisms for broad accountable care adoption and long-term sustainability.
After a decade of work on accountable care models, their adoption has stagnated. Despite continued bipartisan support, industry-wide commitment, and some models showing cost savings and quality improvements, there is not yet an aligned approach to accountable care across the public and private sectors — and fee-for-service reimbursement remains the norm. Moreover, organizations are struggling to make the necessary investments needed to develop new infrastructure, care pathways, and other supports needed for success. With Duke-Margolis’ deep technical policy expertise and credibility across sectors, and West Health’s agility, responsiveness, and network spanning clinical and policy expertise—the partnership is uniquely suited to energize and accelerate the move to accountable care.
Strategy to System Change:
An Accelerated Path Forward
The Duke-Margolis & West Health Accelerator will be the centerpiece of this effort. Built on a years-long foundation of deep policy work and insight generation, the Accelerator comprises a mix of programs and analyses designed to strengthen the infrastructure, evidence, and stakeholder coalitions needed for accountable care models to deliver on their promise.
Our Public-Private Rapid Learning Hub is a cornerstone of this work. It will serve as the foundational infrastructure to support rapid learning, implementation, and scaling of new accountable care models in real-world settings—making it easier for organizations to connect evidence with action. The Hub will enable rapid learning tailored to the specific problems we aim to solve within each of our focus areas, ensuring that the learning method fits the challenge at hand.
Our initial focus areas will be early-stage Alzheimer’s disease and brain health, payment reform in specialty care, and modernizing risk adjustment models, but also want to remain nimble in a rapidly changing policy environment and flexible in our approach.
Our work is focused on solving health system challenges to ensure long-term sustainability and quality of care. We remain committed to our original partnership goal, and with the Accelerator, we are now empowered to move aggressively from a better understanding of the landscape toward re-designing the system.