New Hanover Regional Medical Center officials want to form an Accountable Care Organization (ACO), a model that relies on a network of health care providers sharing patient care responsibilities and reimbursement.

Hospital officials have spent the past several months creating a clinically integrated network as a precursor to an actual ACO, which they hope could be approved and rolled out in a year or two, Sam Spicer, the hospital’s vice president of medical affairs, said Thursday.

“We’ve been working on it for about eight months now. We’ve given a lot of thought to it,” Spicer said.

The federal Affordable Care Act, with its emphasis on bundled payments, outlined ACOs as a major tool to try and contain rising health care costs.

A number of health providers, physicians and hospitals began setting up ACOs in the past year with payers such as health insurance companies and the federal Medicare program.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has approved ACO contracts with more than 200 health providers since last year, including one for a Wilmington Health subsidiary that took effect earlier this month. Wilmington Health also entered an ACO agreement with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.

Spicer said New Hanover Regional would have gone down the ACO road irrespective of Wilmington Health’s move, saying that it is a push for the health care industry.

Don Dalton, spokesman for the N.C. Hospital Association, which has 131 members, said the group has provided education about ACOs to its member hospitals.

"We have some folks who are seriously considering it," said Dalton, pointing to Gastonia-based CaroMont Health as one that has been vocal about its ACO intentions.

Spicer said there was hesitation among some in the health care industry about whether President Obama’s health care reform would survive legal challenges and the presidential election intact or without major changes to the ACO proposal.

“The underlying driver for it was really the cost of care,” Spicer said. “Because of that, we were going to move forward.”

Spicer said it should be easier for New Hanover Regional to work on those collaborations than for hospitals in other markets where tougher competition might make providers less willing to share patient information or data.

He said New Hanover Regional’s first step in developing an ACO was initiating conversations with the physicians working with the hospital on how to improve quality of care through things such as increasing coordination when patients see different doctors and specialists, making sure patients have primary care providers and bringing down admissions through preventive care.

Spicer said health providers know that getting patients more engaged in their care and helping them with preventive wellness to keep them from being hospitalized results in less expensive care and better health outcomes, particularly for those with chronic diseases.

The still relatively new ACO model, however, seeks to make those practices even more standard.

“We’ve never been in a situation in the past, to be financially incentivized to do that,” he said. “That’s what this ACO is about.”