A primary care network, formed in a joint venture with Independence Blue Cross and DaVita’s physician practice arm HealthCare Partners in April to reduce the cost of treating patients with chronic conditions, is getting ready to scratch off the first milestone on its “to do” list: hire 300 primary care physicians.
So far Tandigm Health has inked three-year contracts with 270 physicians — it set a goal of signing on 300 physicians by the end of the year.
The physicians who participate in the initiative get built-in incentives, notably higher reimbursements in exchange for reducing chronic condition costs by working more closely with these patients to keep them out of the hospital.
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Figuring out how to prevent the complications associated with chronic conditions such as diabetes, congestive heart failure and pulmonary disease that drive up the cost of care is one of the biggest challenges in healthcare reform. It’s spawned a lot of experimentation from the use of mobile health, telemedicine, predictive analytics tools and interesting collaborations to whittle down the problem.
Dr. Anthony Coletta, Tandigm’s CEO, talked about why its model is centered on primary care doctors on a payers panel at the CONVERGE conference last month. “No one can drive down costs better than our customers, primary care physicians. There’s tremendous, pent-up demand for our customers to access this kind of network.”
Experimentation is all well and good but there’s a certain aspect of it that feels more like throwing so much spaghetti at the wall, just to see what sticks. Behavior change is usually the desired result for the kind of chronic care patients that the program is designed to help and there’s no one-stop solution for that. The goal is to produce incremental improvements through better patient interventions and improving overall care coordination, Coletta added in a phone interview with MedCity News.
It will also tap IBX’s product toolbox, namely predictive analytics to more easily identify which patients need interventions from physicians. “We hope to bring these predictive tools to bear,” Coletta said.
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
This week it also hired a Chief Medical Officer. It looks like Dr. Kenneth Goldblum will be simplifying his life a bit since he currently is listed as working for four businesses. He has been CMO at Ascentia Health Care Solutions and at Renaissance Health Network, according to LinkedIn. He has has been working as medical director at Gateway Medical Associates and senior vice president at Navvis Healthways.
