Aledade added more than 700 primary care practices to its network for 2026 as the company sees strong tailwinds for value-based care growth.
Aledade, a value-based enablement company, now works with more than 3,000 primary care organizations across the country that care for more than 3 million patients in value-based care programs including the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), Medicare Advantage (MA), Medicaid and commercial contracts. The company partners with independent practices, clinics, community health centers and systems across diverse care settings from urban to rural communities in 46 states and the District of Columbia, according to executives.
"There's really strong desire by providers of all sizes in all parts of the country to get rewarded for providing high-quality care, and these models are now working. MSSP is working. When we grow, whether we're talking about small practices in California or big hospital systems in New York, we're talking about community health centers in Louisiana, or we're talking about mid-sized practices in Montana, the common element all of this is really this desire to help their patients and to get rewarded for it," Mat Kendall, co-founder and president at Aledade, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
"I think that there are a lot of docs that are tired of the fee-for-service mill of trying to do more every time and having to run faster and faster, and they want to get back to why they got into medicine, which is to provide high-quality care. With Aledade, we can reward them for doing that."
Farzad Mostashari, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Aledade, added, "I think the work we've done with execution over the past decade and predictability makes us a natural choice if a practice, larger or small, who has not been in the Medicare Shared Savings Program before wants to move into value-based care. We're the obvious choice, or the default choice, in some ways."
The company hit $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and is focused on improving its profitability in 2026, Mostashari said.
"We want to continue to have good growth not only on the revenue line, but also on how much of that revenue we can now dedicate, not only to research and development and growth, but also turning the corner on profitability. We were profitable last year, comfortably so, and we want to see not only that revenue continue to grow nicely, but even faster growth on the EBITDA line," he noted.
In December, Aledade secured a $500 million senior secured credit facility, led by Ares Credit funds, to support the company as it continues to scale its business. The new credit facility, which has flexibility to expand to up to $650 million, doubles Aledade's current committed financing capacity, the company said in a press release.
Aledade's growth comes as the number of Medicare beneficiaries treated in accountable care organizations continues to rise, according to new data from the Trump administration.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said 14.3 million people are enrolled in an ACO as of January 2026, up by 4.4% from 13.7 million in 2025. The CMS said that for 2026, it approved 134 applications for MSSP, including 72 new participants and 62 returning participants.
That brings total participation in MSSP to 511, up from 476 accountable care organizations in 2025. The CMS said that the MSSP ACOs include more than 700,000 providers and other organizations serving 12.6 million people with traditional Medicare, a 12.3% increase from 2025.
Aledade executives assert that the company’s growth is fueling value-based care adoption nationwide in the CMS' flagship MSSP program. In 2026, the company is serving 1 in 5 of all new MSSP participants and nearly 20% of the total MSSP program.
In the tail end of 2025, the CMS introduced a flurry of new payment and value-based care models. The ACO REACH model is set to conclude at the end of 2026, and the CMS announced the LEAD, or Long-Term Enhanced ACO Design, model as its successor. The 10-year voluntary demonstration officially began Jan. 1 and will run through Dec. 31, 2026.
"This administration has made it clear, Chris Klomp in particular, that they want more and more patients in traditional Medicare to be cared for better in value-based arrangements like ACOs and I've even heard him say, 'I want to kill unmanaged fee-for-service.' That's a pretty bold statement, and we would love to support the administration in that goal," Mostashari said.
Klomp is the director of Medicare and deputy administrator of the CMS.
With regard to the upcoming LEAD model, Mostashari anticipates the initiative could be another vector of growth for the ACO program.
He also points to the recent MA rate proposal for 2027 as another sign of the Trump administration's direction on Medicare policy. The CMS proposed a flat rate update for next year, which sparked backlash from insurers.
"The increases were less than the industry expected, and some of that was due to risk adjustment changes, policy changes, but a big chunk of it was just because the actuaries are saying that growth in traditional Medicare is going to be less than they previously thought, and a big part of that is the efforts they're doing on fraud, waste and abuse and skin substitutes. But it's also the impact of ACOs, and so competition can be helpful to drive everyone to be better, and that can be between MA plans, but it can also be between MA and traditional Medicare," Mostashari said.
"I see that value-based care as almost like an arms dealer that sells to both sides, and both MA plans and traditional Medicare compete," he quipped.
During a Paragon Institute event late last month, Klomp said the MA risk adjustment changes aren’t meant to penalize the market, but to ensure the long-term stability of MA, as Healthcare Dive reported. But “make no mistake. Let me not mince words in the least. We are massively in support of Medicare Advantage,” the Medicare director said, the publication reported.
Executives tout Aledade's strong results with its decade of experience working in value-based care.
In the most recent MSSP performance year, 93% of Aledade’s accountable care organizations achieved savings, and together Aledade generated more than $1 billion in total savings by focusing on improved patient outcomes.
In 2024, Aledade’s MSSP partners conducted more than 800,000 annual wellness visits and collectively achieved hypertension control rates exceeding those of some of the nation’s top health systems. Aledade’s patient outreach programs helped connect at-risk patients with essential services like cancer screenings, medication refills and advance care planning. Together, Aledade prevented more than 260,000 unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency department visits.
Since its founding in 2014, Aledade has helped its partners generate more than $3 billion in healthcare savings, the company says.
Providers on Aledade's network report higher savings over time with improvements in preventive care and chronic disease management, Mostashari said. These practices then continue to add more lives and move to higher levels of risk and reward.
Aledade has built a suite of technology tools, including artificial-intelligence-driven tech, to help primary care organizations adopt value-based care workflows. The company's technology helps practices identify and better manage their most at-risk patients. The tech platform supports earlier clinical intervention and smarter care coordination with a technology platform that captures, centralizes and surfaces actionable patient data at the point of care, executives said.
The company also offers policy expertise, coaching and financial and operational support.
"I think the tech platform really underlies every part of what makes us special. We're able to grow 700 new practices and onboard them faster than ever before because we have a tech-driven implementation. We're able to get behavior change and practices results as early as year one It used to take us three, four years in this industry to get results and get savings, and now many of our practices are seeing savings in year one, which is unprecedented," Mostashari said.
Aledade's software integrates into primary care providers' electronic health record workflows, and the company built AI and analytics tools that generate insights and predictions from patients' data that are then surfaced for providers.
"It allows us to meet providers where they are," Kendall said. "We don't try to force people onto new systems. We really do meet the practices where they are. We deal with all kinds of EHRs, all kinds of different workflows, but our technology allows us to provide high-quality care across them all."
The overall healthcare market's transition from fee-for-service to value-based care has been slowly progressing over the past 15 years. Some value-based care models have struggled to deliver meaningful savings or quality gains. At the same time, healthcare spending and costs have continued to rise.
Mostashari and Kendall see continued momentum behind value-based care, pushed along by federal policy changes.
"With many adoption cycles, you have a gulf between the early adopters and the mainstream. We saturated the early market of the early adopters who were the first to have an EHR and the first to do patient-centered medical home, the first to do ACOs. They're always looking for the new thing, but now the groups that Mat is selling to are those folks who are looking for the tried and true. There's a playbook, there's technology, there's policy stability, all of those things contribute to expanding into the mainstream, and I think we're getting there."