December 5, 2020
There aren’t too many opportunities when you can get the present and the future of primary care in the same room. But that’s exactly what we found at the Louisiana Academy of Family Physicians’ Annual Conference.
On Wednesday afternoon, we arrived at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in downtown New Orleans – Nadine Robin, Aledade’s Southeast Executive Director, and me, Aledade’s Fellow for the Southeast. We were caffeinated, excited and ready to join a massive room full of displays from local hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and specialty groups. We set up our booth, with Aledade’s slogan: “A New Model of Primary Care”, and we waited to see who would come through the doors.
Right on cue, as the conference’s main sessions took a break, the showcase room flooded with health care professionals from across Louisiana – independent doctors, curious hospital employees, even medical students from Louisiana State University. (Geaux Tigers!)
They dropped by a number of different booths, but kept lingering by ours, wondering what that “new model of primary care” actually meant. So Nadine explained: with MIPS, the new payment program created by the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (or “MACRA”), quality reporting was taking center stage.
Small, independent practices are the key to that focus on quality. As our CEO Farzad Mostashari has pointed out, small, physician-owned practices offer more personalization for patients. They have lower average costs per patient, fewer preventable hospital admissions, and lower readmission rates than larger, independent- and hospital-owned practices. In other words, they’re in the best position to succeed.
Nadine explained how Aledade helps their independent partner practices report these quality measures all while maintaining their independence. I noticed that a few physicians’ ears perked up at this – the prospect of having a helpful guide through MACRA and MIPS seemed to be integral to their practices staying independent.
I remember one doctor in particular who pulled us aside. He felt like his clinic was short-staffed, and the pressure to sell his practice was only growing. Nadine and I listened to him, and explained that the whole purpose of Aledade is to help small, independent physicians like his stay independent – and thrive. But to do that, we have to start with an honest relationship. We weren’t going to pressure him into joining Aledade if it wasn’t going to be in the best interest of his practice and his patients. We agreed to pull his QRUR report and follow up to see if a partnership with Aledade would be his best step.
We also spoke with some of the physicians of tomorrow. A few medical students from LSU dropped by our booth, wondering what an ACO was. To many of them, the idea of opening their own independent practice seemed out of reach. The concept of a comprehensive approach to primary care, one where the independent practice is in the center of a high value network, sounded promising. They asked us if they could reach out to us later to get a better understanding of an ACO and value-based care.
That Friday morning, Nadine and Matt Wheeler, one of our inspiring Office Administrators from Bossier Family Medicine in Bossier City, gave a presentation about the new world of alternative payment models. They laid out the idea of value-based care – that physicians should be empowered to provide quality care, and rewarded for helping their patients stay healthy.
They explained what an ACO is – basically a group of health care professionals committed to the health and well-being of a specific group of patients. And they explained why this future – better health care at lower cost – was inevitable. It’s good for doctors, good for patients and good for society.
Nadine and Matt weren’t the only ones making the case for value-based care. A number of Aledade’s partner physicians in Louisiana were there too – each of them explaining to other doctors why value-based care works.
This whole move to a better health care system isn’t being led by any single practice or any single company, like Aledade. It’s a partnership – a network of practices who want to keep their patients healthy, and organizations working to help those practices succeed. Value-based care is the best model for today’s primary care physicians here in Louisiana, and tomorrow’s too.