Heartland Physicians ACO

Through june 30, 2019, Heartland Physicians Aco successfully completed the fourth performance year of mssp Aco participation, working to improve the quality of care provided to our medicare beneficiaries while also addressing healthcare costs. We held an annual spring educational meeting, two in-person learning collaboratives for practice teams (the providers, nurses, administrators, and support staff) involved in the Aco, and numerous in-person and web-based educational sessions for providers and staff. Most practices also completed a substantial quality improvement project. We continued refinement of secure and effective communication with practices and providers to get the results of our cms claims data analysis into the hands of the practice teams to support quality and process improvement in the offices. In 2019 we transitioned to using a population health platform called the garage to collect, analyze, and report quality and cost data to our Aco practices. We track both quality and cost data in each practice and across the entire Aco, utilizing the Aco quality and medical management committee, as well as the Aco board of directors to guide the work of the Aco. We successfully completed the initial gpro audit of quality data, and used these results to set Aco quality improvement goals for next year. We completed the required caphs survey of patient experience, and also used these results to guide our practice improvement efforts moving forward. Our on-site and webinar sessions with each practice addressed important topics such as telemedicine, quality measures and improvement efforts, interpreting and using cost data, understanding risk assessment and coding in value-based purchasing, etc. We also held monthly phone conferences with each practice to support and direct their Aco efforts.