HealthTeamWorks on Transforming Healthcare: Our Evolving Story

With the release of its annual evidence review this week, the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) provided the most comprehensive support to date that Patient-Centered Medical Homes (PCMH) drive reductions in healthcare costs and unnecessary resource utilization, such as emergency department visits, inpatient hospitalizations and hospital readmissions. This makes the establishment of PCMHs an ideal vehicle to achieve the Triple – and now Quadruple – Aim of better care, better health, lower costs and improved provider experience in Colorado. We at HealthTeamWorks welcome this news, since we’re in the business of delivering best-in-class primary care practice transformation services to our clients in Colorado and across the nation. We look forward to continuing this important work with our innovative partners, including The Colorado Health Foundation, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and the Department of Family Medicine within the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

In my first six months as CEO of HealthTeamWorks, I have had the pleasure of seeing firsthand how our incredible practice improvement professionals not only achieve amazing results, but also analyze our tools and techniques and adjust their strategy when they encounter evidence that suggests an even better approach for achieving meaningful, long-lasting quality improvement. Even as we transform primary care practice, we as an organization are transforming ourselves. We are growing and exploring new ways to put patients at the center of healthcare as the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) dramatically changes the way that Medicare rewards clinicians for value over volume and streamlines multiple quality programs under the new Merit-Based Incentive Payments System (MIPS) and provides bonus payments for participation in eligible alternative payment models (APMs). The next few years will be pivotal for healthcare reimbursement policy, and we plan to help healthcare providers stay firmly ahead of the curve.

We are poised and ready to meet these emerging challenges; for example, with new programs and services to help physician groups that are part of integrated delivery networks understand exactly where the opportunities lie for them to shift focus from volume-based, fee for service care to more value-based, bundled care models and optimized resource integration. And looking even further into the future, HealthTeamWorks is watching with great interest the emerging story of healthcare and its interconnection with various social determinants of health. It’s a time of broadening perspectives where we are increasingly looking outside of healthcare to effectively address some of the toughest problems related to health and well-being. HealthTeamWorks looks forward to playing an active role in finding the solutions.