Moving Healthcare Forward Together: 2020 Year in Review
A message from Jeff Rideout, MD
Healthcare delivery has been challenged like never before with the arrival of COVID-19 earlier this year. Despite these challenges, we are grateful for your continued partnership and the success and progress we’ve accomplished together over the past 12 months. With your support in 2020, we:
Hosted CMS and the California Department of Managed Health Care for a webinar discussion on telehealth during COVID-19.
Onboarded additional provider organizations and health plans to Symphony, propelling the program toward critical mass by 2022.
Adapted AMP MY 2020 accountability measures and incentive design to address COVID-19’s impact on healthcare system performance.
Produced the first year of AMP Medi-Cal Managed Care measurement and reporting for patient experience, providing participating health plans, POs, and FQHCs with insights on patient experience.
Symphony Provider Directory
In its second year, Symphony has continued its growth as the statewide platform for provider data management. The program now has 15 health plans and 115 provider organization participants and counting. Efforts this year focused on developing data standards, preparing our clients to exchange data, and working with our technology vendors and regulators to scale Symphony.
At this year’s Stakeholders meeting, we presented our insights from working with Symphony clients so far alongside a few lessons learned. You can get the recording and slides on our website.
Looking ahead to 2021
Next year, IHA will continue optimizing data exchange and make other operational improvements. The Symphony-Availity integration will expand to additional plans and providers and, as Symphony grows, we have plans to add ancillary providers.
Align. Measure. Perform. (AMP)
As part of our efforts toward alignment, standardization, and process predictability for stakeholders, this was the first year we released preliminary and final results for all four AMP products at the same time.
In response to COVID-19, we pivoted earlier this year to focus on measuring what matters most during a pandemic. By releasing a prioritized, more limited set of measures we aimed to ensure the pandemic does not unfairly impact provider organization performance results.
And last month we recognized 80 physician organizations in California who achieved top scores in quality, total cost of care, patient experience, and performance improvement. This includes 20 Excellence in Healthcare Award winners, who performed in the top 50% across quality, patient experience, and cost. You can view the public results on the Office of the Patient Advocate’s medical group report card.
California Regional Healthcare Cost & Quality Atlas
Measuring healthcare performance across the state, the Atlas helps uncover clinical quality, hospital utilization and cost of care metrics for 75% of Californians. After releasing the new 2018 results earlier this year, we continued to see the following trends:
Integrated care organizations typically perform better than non-integrated care organizations.
Financial risk-sharing between plans and providers generally results in better clinical quality and lower total cost of care.
Ongoing variation in quality and cost across California, some of which may be avoidable.
Visit the Atlas website to get additional cost and quality of care insights.
IHA unveils new brand and website
After many months of hard work, we’re happy to announce the launch of IHA’s new brand and website. Take a look around at www.iha.org. The updated brand conveys who we are and what we do in an engaging, easy-to-understand way—better representing the important work we do together to solve healthcare’s biggest challenges. In the coming months, you’ll begin to see our new look show up on social media and in our materials.
'Tis the season
The holidays look a bit different this year, but fortunately the spirit of giving has not changed. We are proud to share that IHA staff collectively contributed $4,000 to the Alameda County Community Food Bank this holiday season.
In the face of the pandemic, your resilience and resolve to deliver high-value care has been remarkable. As we look ahead to 2021, we can’t lose sight of the need to drive results. With your continued partnership, I know we can continue to move healthcare forward.
We wish you and your loved ones a peaceful holiday season and health and happiness in the New Year.
Integrated Healthcare Association, 500 12th Street, Suite 310, Oakland, CA