Greetings and Happy Autumn to all in the Alliance. I hope that you have
had a happy, healthy and productive summer. Although the summer typically
has been a slower pace with a brief respite from our monthly board meetings
and a general slowdown in pace, due to intense heat, we all know that
healthcare takes no holidays! Our care coordinators continue to provide
their excellent assistance in managing our most complex and high risk
patients and the staff, particularly Medical Director, Dr. Rick Lewis
and Population Health Analytics Director, Mr. Thomas Magrino, have been
busy reaching out and meeting with the majority of practices, particularly
primary care, educating them on their recent quality data and reviewing
nuances of the ever changing guidelines of CMS and other third party payors.
As mentioned in our last newsletter and expounded in Dr. Lewis’ article
in this missive, Mary Washington Hospital and the Mary Washington Health
Alliance are teaming up to launch a new Medicare Advantage Plan. Although
most of the information on this plan has been purposely ‘word of
mouth’ due to regulatory issues, full scale marketing goes into
effect October 1st and you will see more information than you may want to see. The beauty
of this plan, in addition to moving up the food chain of the premium dollar,
is that WE ARE THE PLAN. The Alliance is the narrow network that not only
provides the care for our patients, but we have a great deal of say in
what additional benefits our patients will receive without having to compromise
on quality. Additionally, we will have all the data and metrics on these
patients, and we can do the analytics to assess our own quality care without
depending on CMS to tell us what our data shows.
Speaking of quality, Dr. Woodford’s committee has been busily engaged
in enhancing communication among ourselves, particularly between the outlying
primary care physicians and mostly hospital-based specialists. Offering
TigerConnect to additional physicians will certainly help improve direct
contact and break down some of those barriers that hamper our direct patient
care. The committee is also working closely with Dr. Chris Newman, our
new Chief Operations Officer and Chief Medical Officer, to explore the
possibility of a Transition Clinic which will assist our community providers
in the transfer of care from hospital bedside to bedside at home. In addition,
the work of our EPIC Connect team is also ramping up, working with a variety
of practices to move up to EPIC to make it easier for all of us to access
information on our patients and share charts to minimize miscommunication.
I continually am excited and proud of our Alliance as we continue to have
significant success in population health management but am also realistic
in knowing that it continues to get harder to improve upon on early successes
as the ‘low hanging fruit’ is almost all picked. We are, however,
based on our experience, getting pretty good at what we do.
In closing, I do want to mention that our quality scores for the Alliance
for CMS are going to be increasingly dependent on patient surveys and
patient experience. We are finally seeing the pendulum swing from the
three E’s (efficiency, expediency and economics) back to what we
used to value in health care, the three A’s (ability, availability,
and affability).
So be good, be present, and be nice.