More Than Forty Health Systems Share Strategies to Improve Population Health at National ACO Summit
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Experts from more than 40health systems recently convened in Cleveland to share population health management strategies at the Premier healthcare alliance’s national accountable care organization (ACO) summit. University Hospitals (Cleveland) and Summa Health System (Akron, Ohio) co-hosted the event April 21-24.
Members of Premier’s ™ population health collaborative attended the summit. PACT unites 79 health systems across 40 states and payors engaging in ACOs to learn from each other while measuring and benchmarking care with integrated patient data. These organizations have more than 80 ACO agreements with both the federal government and private payors.
Andrew Hertz, MD, vice president and medical director for University Hospitals Rainbow Care Connection, discussed applying accountable care and population health principles to a pediatric population. Rainbow Care Connection is one of the first pediatric ACOs in the country, designed to improve the overall health and wellness of more than 65,000 children. Funded through a grant from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, the new type of multidisciplinary model aims to produce positive changes in pediatric care including greater focus on wellness and chronic disease in an outpatient setting. The program manages care for children experiencing high rates of ER visits, multiple complex chronic conditions and behavioral health problems.
Martin P. Hauser, CEO of SummaCare Inc., Summa Health’s provider-owned health insurance company, co-presented a session with Brian J. Silverstein, MD, managing director, Geisinger Consulting Group (Danville, Pa.) on developing ACO arrangements with employers. SummaCare is one of the region’s only provider-owned health insurance companies, composed of more than 7,000 quality healthcare physicians and 50 hospitals. Major employers are seeking new population health arrangements which create incentives for helping their employees remain healthy.
In addition, SummaCare Chief Medical Officer Mumtaz Ibrahim, MD, and Kim Bixenstine, Esq., vice president and deputy general counsel at University Hospitals, discussed palliative and end-of-life care focusing on greater family involvement to better meet the needs of patients.
Additional summit sessions included:
“PACT participants areamong the nation’s leaders and early adopters in redesigning care to be more valuable and patient-centric,” said Premier Performance Partners Senior Vice President Wes Champion. “By comparing performance, sharing intelligence and creating open forums for idea exchange, they’re both learning from and informing one another. This type of collaboration is key to achieving system-wide change that impacts quality, the care experience and bends the cost curve. Early results from these organizations are promising.”
A recent based on lessons learned from PACT members details the steps to developing a successful ACO model. Chief among them is technology that seamlessly integrates sophisticated population health status measurement with aggregated data on utilization, demographics, financial performance, quality scores and other metrics. This information must be linked across the continuum to support predictive modeling, targeted services, provider evaluations and patient interventions.
PACT has helped more than 400 hospitals in 100 communities develop core accountable care capabilities and strategies. All 20 of its member health systems that applied to a Medicare ACO program, such as the MSSP, did so successfully.
PACT members collaborate to increase quality of care, implement and share evidence-based best practices, improve the patient experience, lower costs, enhance hospital-physician alignment, and advance toward population health management. Members already functioning as ACOs or who want to build the infrastructure to become an ACO:
Premier is the nation’s largest performance improvement alliance of more than 2,800 U.S. hospitals and 93,000 other sites using the power of collaboration and technology to lead the transformation to coordinated, high-quality, cost-effective care. Owned by healthcare providers, Premier operates a leading purchasing network with more than $5 billion in annual savings. Premier also maintains clinical, financial and outcomes databases based on 1 in every 4 patient discharges. A world leader in measurably improving patient care, Premier has the largest performance improvement collaboratives in America, including one in partnership with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has an office in Washington. . Stay connected with Premier on , , and .