Hospitals, Health IT

Geisinger hits Jersey Shore with AtlantiCare merger

The Geisinger Health System empire is bringing its model of value-based care to the Atlantic City area.

The Geisinger Health System empire has hit the Jersey Shore, and it is bringing its model of value-based care with it.

Geisinger, of Danville, Pennsylvania, has completed its takeover of Atlantic City, New Jersey-based AtlantiCare, after a year and a half of trying to win regulatory approval in the Garden State.

“We can now move forward together to advance population health, improve quality and enhance care for the patients and communities in southern New Jersey,” Geisinger President and CEO Dr. David Feinberg said Thursday.

Geisinger, which owns both a large provider network across much of Pennsylvania and a health plan, is known for being an early adopter of accountable care and of information technology. Geisinger’s Epic Systems electronic health record contains data on more than 3 million patients, and the related patient portal has 275,000 users.

AtlantiCare has won several awards for excellence itself, including a 2009 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. “I think today, Geisinger got much better,” Feinberg said.

AtlantiCare President and CEO David Tilton said that his organization has 40,000 patients in an accountable care organization, and also participates in the Medicare Shared Savings Program.

“More recently, we have been learning about Geisinger’s shared-care models,” Tilton said from Atlantic City in a conference call with reporters Thursday. AtlantiCare and Geisinger had been in merger talks for nearly two years.

While AtlantiCare has not made money from the ACO or the MSSP yet, Tilton said that there are no plans to change either strategy because the New Jersey organization has improved patient outcomes and reduced hospital admissions with accountable care.

Tilton said that no decision has been made whether AtlantiCare would ditch its current Cerner inpatient EHR in favor of the Epic technology in use at Geisinger.

UPDATE: AtlantiCare released this video of the merger ceremony.

Photo: AtlantiCare

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