Health reform driving payer-provider partnerships
By Les Masterson
Healthcare Dive, August 2, 2017
Payers and providers have for decades stayed in their silos, leading to a more fractured and adversarial healthcare system. That relationship, however, is starting to soften for many in the industry. Payer-provider partnerships put the two groups on the same team in hopes of reducing costs and improving care and outcomes through sharing data and better communication.
A major driver of these partnerships is the move away from fee-for-service payments and toward valued-based payments and population health management.
The payer-provider partnerships popping up across healthcare vary in type, size, location and model. There are 50/50 joint ventures with co-branding, and less intensive partnerships like accountable care organizations (ACO), patient-centered medical homes (PCMH), pay for performance and bundled payments.
The first step in these partnerships is building trust between payers and providers.
Another key is communication. (Chuck Lehn, president of Banner Health Network) acknowledged that communicating across systems and platforms between two organizations and healthcare providers requires time, attention and resources.
Caring for the whole patient works best when payers and providers share data, so there is improved care management, better interventions and better analytics around population health.
The two sides can go much deeper into care for patients by going beyond claims. In partnerships, payers shouldn’t have to wait for claims to see how their members are doing and doctors shouldn’t have to hope that their patients tell them when they have received care elsewhere.
In addition to regular back and forth, payers and providers need regular meetings, whether monthly or quarterly, that focus on strategic issues about the partnership, said (James Leatherwood, marketing communications manager at Availity).
One barrier that still needs resolution in partnerships is moving providers away from phone communication.
Leatherwood said a more efficient way is a queue system. In this system, a provider could check the status of all claims and get alerts when they need to provide more information. The system would allow providers to look in one queue, update the claims information and then move on with their day. Payers would have their own queue and would get alerts when providers have questions. This would reduce phone calls and create immediacy.
Leatherwood said the healthcare system is stuck in a “chart chase” between providers and payers, and moving to an automated queue system would be a gamechanger.
“I think in the near-term what we’re going to see is larger healthcare providers are going to be more strategic, working directly with payers. The health plans are going to be more interested not just in working with the staff level, but executive levels,” said Leatherwood.
The third part of a successful partnership is aligning incentives that focus on keeping people healthy and creating a positive healthcare experience, said (Thomas Robinson, partner at Oliver Wyman).
Partnerships must provide patients the right incentives, integration, investment, insight and innovation to work with the plan to deliver improvements across cost, quality, outcomes and experience, said Robinson.
“The point of these partnerships is to create something new, rather than just building the same old offerings with a narrow network. Successful partnerships will take the opportunity to innovate around the product and experience now that the incentives, insight, investment and integration are all for it,” said Robinson.
Aetna and Banner Health agreed on the partnership in October 2016 and have been laying out the groundwork before its launch this month in Maricopa and Pinal counties in Arizona. The two companies hope to expand the program statewide ultimately.
To prepare for the partnership, Tom Grote, who became CEO of Banner/Aetna joint venture in May, told Healthcare Dive that Banner Health and Aetna have developed joint operating committees, including marketing/sales and population health, that include members from both organizations.
The partnership looks to improve consumer experience by fully integrating providers, Aetna and administrative services, while eliminating redundancies in care and administrative problems. Aetna and Banner Health expect streamlining care and services will lead to savings for patients and employers.
(Brigitte Nettesheim, president of transformative markets for Aetna) said the partnerships are about “each side playing to its strengths, aligning incentives and driving scale.”
(Tom Leyden, director II of the Value Partnerships Program at BCBSM) said providers want to be active participants in system transformation.
“This requires ongoing support from the payer and demonstrated evidence of practice transformation and clinic results from the provider community,” said Leyden. “Administration of these programs is an integral aspect of measuring performance.”
Leyden said the payer strives to make the programs as manageable as possible because physicians need to perform many administrative tasks on an ongoing basis. BCBSM regularly solicits feedback from providers during quarterly meetings and phone calls, emails, webinars and in-person meetings on what’s working, what’s not and what needs to be changed.
“If we keep the customer — the end user — in mind and build partnerships with that as our North Star, we believe we will have a more successful, efficient and collaborative health system,” said Grote.
http://www.healthcaredive.com…
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Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
Wow! These are the people who are in charge. They control the medical industrial complex. Based on this rhetoric they no longer have to be concerned about medical loss ratio minimums of 80 or 85 percent since their administrative functions have fused into health care delivery. That way they can best serve the “the customer — the end user.”
We need to throw these jerks out and establish a single payer national health program so that we can best serve, yes, the patient!
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