About VBCA: Value-Based Care Advisors
We were running these programs long before we built the firm.
VBCA began in 2020, started by people already working inside Medicare's value-based programs.
- CMS-approved QCDR
- Medicare Shared Savings Program ACO
- Development partner to Penn Medicine and Tuva Health
Before VBCA, our founding team did this work inside large physician enterprises: running ACOs, managing MIPS reporting, and reading each year's rule the week it came out. The firm grew out of what we saw there. Within a few years we were advising physician practices, health systems, and CMS itself on how the Quality Payment Program and the Shared Savings Program play out in real clinics.
Every year the programs got more technical. The software practices could buy didn't keep up.
We couldn't find the tools we needed. So we built them.
What started as internal software is now the platform behind our CMS-approved registry and our own Medicare ACO. It follows CMS's measure specifications and scoring rules exactly as published, and we report our own ACO through it, the same way our clients do.
Penn Medicine, Gates Ventures, and Tuva Health chose us to help build the MSSP data model.
Every ACO gets the same box of files from CMS, each in its own format, and making them usable has meant paying a vendor six figures. Penn Medicine, funded by Gates Ventures, partnered with Tuva Health to build an open-source model for those files. They wanted one development partner who lived with them every month, and they picked VBCA from several dozen applicants. For a year, Tuva engineered and we checked every output against what a live ACO knows to be true.
Our own ACO runs on that model every day, and so do the tools we license to other ACOs.
The same people who shape the policy engineer the platform.
We also write quality measures. Our founding team has authored nearly 20, and CMS invited us to introduce our SGLT2 measure for chronic kidney disease nationally as a CQM in 2027.
- Policy analysis
- We read every Physician Fee Schedule rule, proposed and final, and tell each client what it changes for them.
- Data engineering
- Cost analytics, score modeling, and benchmarks are built in-house, on the methodology CMS uses.
- Clinical review
- A physician checks the clinical logic behind measure choices and cost findings before a client sees them.
- Submissions
- Every submission is validated before it goes to CMS. The registry has a clean audit record.
Clinical leadership
Kristy Reinert, MD
Co-founder & Physician Advisor
Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Reinert spent years in hospital medicine and clinical operations before co-founding VBCA. Her review keeps the analytics honest about how care actually gets delivered.
Why we do this work
“When program complexity threatens business viability, it threatens healthcare access.”
These programs weigh most on the practices with the fewest people to absorb them, and those are often the ones their communities depend on. We wrote down why that matters to us, and what it means for what we build.
From our essay Business Viability Is Healthcare Access · Reviewed by Kristy Reinert, MD
49%
of solo clinicians were penalized under MIPS in the 2025 payment year. 29% took the maximum 9% cut, against 2% of clinicians overall.
It is also why we answer CMS during the comment period. When a proposal would penalize clinicians for something outside their control, we say so, with data, while the rule can still change.
Six years in, we work with more than 100 practices across 12+ states, from solo practitioners to large health systems. The people who built the platform are still the people they talk to.
- Documented client value
- $40M+
- Quality reporting tier
- Top 1%
- Lost to non-compliance
- $0
- Client retention
- 96%
We'd like to hear about your practice
A short note is plenty
Or email Support@VBCA.com