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| Paul Buehrens, MD, EHP Medical Director |
EHP continues growing and earns local and national recognition
With 607 providers caring for 22,000 patients under four contracts, new contracts coming online January 1 for the Premera ACO, and the State of Washington Health Care Authority ACO contract for public employees – EHP continues to grow! We have begun implementing Wellcentive in our first sites, including EvergreenHealth Primary Care, Sammamish, and Totem Lake Family Medicine in October. During this time we have been rising to the challenge of using ICD 10.
We will expand Wellcentive as fast as we can to our other sites, and extend it throughout the next year to as many of our EHP primary care practices as possible. We are building the capacity to house our own internal claims reporting, dashboards, quality metrics, and data analytics through population health software. EvergreenHealth is currently assisting EHP with an assessment process to prepare EHP to accept Medicare Advantage contracts for 2017.
This is a process that has a long lead time with decisions to contract needed by next spring, 2016. Our Quality Analyst, Sara Rutherford, and Nurse Care Coordinator, Debi Jefferson, RN, are utilizing health plan generated data to improve the delivery of necessary services beyond Seattle’s benchmark best of 12 metropolitan areas to even better, delivering data that is actionable to large and small primary care practices to close care gaps and exceed these benchmarks – an all-around win for patients, practices, payers, and EHP. Together, we generated savings in year one, and delivered checks to our providers for a successful gain-sharing year with First Choice, serving the EH community of employees and dependents.
EHP is receiving recognition by the payers, and nationally. As your Medical Director, I have recently attended conferences at Wellcentive in Georgia and at the Healthcare IT Connect national conference in Chicago. These conferences, as always, are beneficial networking opportunities. EHP is also an anchor member of Cambia Grove, sponsored by Regence, which connects startup entrepreneurs with innovative industry related products and ideas with health care providers.
These opportunities will help EHP bring state of the art population health software and other technology tools to bear on managing our patients so that we can bring the right services to the right patients, at the right time, for the right price. Building these internal capacities will allow us to find and deliver better contracts, as well as transition more fluidly from volume to value, as the health care industry swings toward the new paradigm.
In his book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins discusses the best performing companies, and their initiative to set a ‘BHAG’: a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Our ‘BHAG’ is to provide the highest value health care to our patients in the nation. To do so, we have to “build a flywheel”. That “flywheel” is EHP, and with our collaborative architecture and DNA, I believe we have the opportunity to deliver on that BHAG. This ambition is what motivates me in our work ahead, and in a world of providers competing on value, I believe that EHP is a frontrunner in a community that already stands out for its cost effectiveness and value to our patients.