Ideally, healthcare providers should avoid unnecessary admissions and readmissions and work instead to improve their patient population’s health and hospital experience. This may require getting timely, high quality metrics on factors such as emergency room efficiency, cost management, patient flow, staff productivity, clinical outcomes, efficacy of treatment, and “Meaningful Use”. This, in turn, would require high quality, near real time, highly actionable analytics which will be delivered leveraging state of the art operational, clinical, and financial analytics platforms. Are we just getting started with these platforms or riding the maturity curve? What related people, process, and technology challenges will have to be overcome before accountable care can be delivered consistently and reliably?