The MaineHealth Accountable Care Organization recently reinvested $200,000 in shared savings to help fund eight projects that align with the ACO’s care improvement goals.
The MaineHealth ACO is a network of 11 hospitals, 347 medical practices and over 1,700 healthcare providers in Maine and New Hampshire.
During a recent podcast produced by the ACO, Rob Chamberlin, M.D., M.B.A., the ACO's chief medical officer, said, “When the ACO earns shared savings, the vast majority of that goes back to the medical groups or private practice providers at the hospitals. But these shared savings transformation funds are earmarked for special innovations that go to support those healthcare groups that are above and beyond what we distribute through the regular shared savings distribution model.” He said that through a competitive application process, the ACO identified eight projects to receive funding.
Three of the projects involve giving new tools to primary care teams to provide enhanced care for their patients. “One project that we'll be giving funding to help with hypertension remote monitoring to help our primary care teams be able to monitor patients' blood pressure at home and titrate medications based on that,” Chamberlin said. There are a couple of projects out of St Mary's Health System in Lewiston, Maine — one to get dermatoscopes so that they can do dermoscopy in their primary care practices, and another for them to get some diagnostic continuous glucose monitoring within their primary care practices. “All three of those projects are really going to be new tools for primary care teams to provide better care for their patients from within their own offices,” he added.
In terms of expanding teams within primary care, Maine Behavioral Health will be partnering with the Westbrook practice from MaineHealth Medical Group to do a pilot of the collaborative care model. “That's really about expanding the behavioral healthcare part of the team,” Chamberlin said, “and St Mary's is going to be using some funding to support nurses to do self-management and prevention of chronic diseases, so really kind of expanding the role of the nurse.”
Moving beyond primary care, the MaineHealth healthy aging team is going to be looking to engage eight to 10 facilities in the Age-Friendly Health Systems Improvement Initiative. From Maine Medical Center, Dr. Chris Wellins is looking to invest in a technology that helps identify patients who can go home after their hospital stay instead of going to a skilled nursing facility. “Lastly, we were able to support a project from the Southern Maine Hospital emergency departments. They are looking to put together some harm reduction kits for patients who are identified as high risk,” he said. “These kits will have things like Narcan and condoms and other things to help reduce the risk of overdose or other things. And we know that that's really been a crisis that continues to plague our communities. So altogether, these are a bunch of projects that we really are excited to be able to support, and we're really grateful for the hard work of the care teams that help us earn the shared savings that we can then reinvest in initiatives like this.”
Chamberlin explained how the projects tie into the ACO’s mission. “If you look at these projects, it's really about new tools to help with management of chronic diseases; it's about expanded teams to provide that support to our patients. It's about responding to a community crisis of patients who are overdosing on opioids,” he said. “It really just inspires me so much because what I see when these applications come through is care teams who are saying, give us the tools we needed and we have great ways to take care of our patients, and that, when we do that well, that kind of realizes our goal of providing high-value care to our patients, which is what we're here for.”
