It’s not just in the well-known advanced managed care markets that the accountable care phenomenon is making progress these days; indeed, there are accountable care organizations (ACOs) whose leaders are pressing ahead, all across the U.S. Some leaders are operating ACOs in collaboration with private health insurers; a significant number are participating with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in one of its several ACO programs.
One organization that has been making exciting strides forward in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), the largest of the Medicare ACO programs, is Coastal Carolina Quality Care, an ACO based in New Bern, North Carolina, a community of about 30,000 people located about two hours east of Raleigh, that state’s capital, and an hour west of the Atlantic coast. Coastal Carolina Quality Care is sponsored by Coastal Carolina Health Care, P.A., a multispecialty group practice located in New Bern, and which provides care to its community at 16 locations, involving 43 physicians and 20 allied healthcare professionals. Coastal Carolina Quality Care was created in April 2012 and chartered as one of the first 27 MSSP ACOs; it currently has 11,500 Medicare enrollees attributed to it.
Recently, Stephen Nuckolls, Coastal Carolina Quality Care’s CEO, spoke with Healthcare Informatics Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland regarding his organization’s ongoing journey into and through value-based healthcare delivery and payment. Below are excerpts from that interview.
Your organization has now been participating in the MSSP program for six years, correct?
Yes, that’s correct. We are ending our second contract cycle in December. We will renew, under the new proposed Pathways to Success regulations; there will be a six-month period where we’ll stay in our current track, but starting July 1 of next year, we’re planning to enter their Enhanced Track, the equivalent of their Track 3 under the current regulations. That includes downside risk. We’ve been in Track 1 Plus; we came into that starting January 1 of this year.
In other words, you’re already taking downside risk?
Correct; it’s a limited form of downside risk based on the revenue standard. Eight percent of our Medicare fee-for-service revenue, is the maximum we’d have to pay back. The maximum gain would be 10 percent of benchmark, which for us would be $12 million.
What’s your sense of how your organization is doing in the program this year?
Well, for 2016, we achieved a little over 4 percent savings, and a little over 6 percent savings for 2017; and through the second quarter of this year, we were a little over 8 percent savings—so far.
That’s really great. What do you see as the secret of your success so far?
It’s hard to pinpoint any one thing. There are several things. Number one, it takes time for some of these strategies, such as population health, to pay off. Another thing that’s going on is that our care management program, I give credit for keeping our costs low and getting things in place. And in addition, we really made a lot of strides in our first contract cycle, specific to our market. All of our annual wellness visits and preventive care, we made our marks there and that positioned us well in our second contract cycle. And it just takes time, when you focus on the quality of care, for… when a greater percentage of your patients have their blood pressure under control, you’ll have fewer adverse events. And when you work to lower a1cs, that will avert events over time. And annual wellness visits, vaccinations, screening services—it costs money for screenings; and once you get things set up, that’s then in place. And care management services—when you go into your second contract cycle, you have some of those costs worked into your contract cycle the second time; so it takes time to achieve shared savings, and to get the staff to focus on the sickest population.
With regard to the electronic health record and data analytics, in the context of population health work, what learnings have you and your colleagues achieved so far?
Data analytics are key with this. We have a dashboard right in our Allscripts EHR. We’ve really used that dashboard, and we’ve used that module to track things; we’ve done things around opioid abuse disorder, and tracking things. Most people don’t associate that crisis with the Medicare population, but there is a good number of people on Medicare for disability. And we’ve really used our EHR to help track prescriptions, and to pinpoint patients to make sure they’re getting the right care and support. And with regard to point-of-care dashboards, we’ve just found those to be incredibly helpful. And focusing on tracking outcomes, at the individual physician level; doctors are competitive, so that helps. And we’ve used Allscripts’ reporting package that allows things to print out well and that works well in meetings, and that helps get the point across about how these numbers relate to the day-to-day practice aspects. That’s what drew us to the program: if you give good care to the patients and it keeps them healthier, it’s good for the practice’s bottom line.
What have been the most difficult challenges in the journey so far?
We’ve had many. One is around physician engagement. We did not achieve savings during our first contact cycle, and that was disappointing, because we felt we were doing a good job. So, maintaining engagement, and making sure we were making good investments in the program. Now, we have reached the point where we’re financially successful, and our projections are looking good for this next contract cycle. Some of it had to do with the vagaries and complexities of establishing this new benchmark. They’ve fixed a lot of those things.
Another challenge is around care management, just getting up to speed on chronic care management, and how to bill for that and set up that program, so it can show itself as a break-even center in a fee-for-service world, cost-justifying that, and training and educating, that was a real hurdle, but I’m proud of that now. It’s a little more than care management, some would call it practice transformation or team-based health. But there’s a lot about how to pay for setting all that up.
Many ACO leaders have commented on what’s popularly known as the “one foot in the boat, one on the shore” problem of having to manage both fee-for-service and value-based payment realities at the same time. Your thoughts?
We’re actually fairly fortunate in that we’re what Medicare considers a low-revenue ACO. Our doctors comprise a low percentage of the overall dollars. When we see patients and are keeping them healthier, we’re at least breaking even.
So you have low overhead, and that keeps you in a good position, in that context?
Correct. We do have our own processes, where we give certain kinds of injections, for example. Now that we’re looking at a 75-percent shared savings track—when you move from 50 percent to 75 percent, you get past what you’d call incremental revenue. You can really start to look at some of the internal costs. If you’re in a 50-percent shared-savings world, and let’s say we get paid $100 for an office visit; if you don’t do that office visit, you increase your shared savings by $50; but you have to look at incremental costs. For example, a shot of Porlea that costs $600. The point is that when you get to 75-percent savings, it makes the math a bit different in terms of your incremental costs of providing a service. You get closer to saying, if I can provide this drug or see the patient, it makes more sense to move to virtual visits or not always bringing the patient in for an in-person visit—when it’s someone we’ve seen three or four times recently and know the patient well—the doctor may handle it over the phone, for example. It changes the calculus as we go forward.
What should CIOs, CMIOs, and other senior healthcare IT leaders be thinking about, based on all of this?
As far as population health management and trying to get the numbers together, make it simple for the physicians to use; make sure they have enough resources at the point of care to use; and make sure you’ve answered the question of what’s in it for them to use it. So a CIO might buy a big, fancy system, and it’s wonderful, but the doctors may not use it unless they know what’s in it for them. Unless there’s an incentive for them to use it, the human behavior is, I’ll just generate as many RVUs as I can, as I’ve always done, and this slows me down. So I’d tell a CIO or CMIO to set up a system that’s simple, that encourages the physicians to use it, and provides incentives to use it. In some cases, we had to hire scribes.
And what has your experience with scribes been like?
It depends. In some practices, we’ve crashed and burned, and then some practices couldn’t live without them. It depends on the number of patients the doctor has, and their comfort level for having someone in the room. Our doctors with larger patient panels and not so particular about how their notes looked, FPs, they’ve done well with scribes; with general internists with smaller panels, they’ve had less success because there’s not so much of a need for it.
What do the next two years look like for you and your group?
I’d like to talk about Pathways For Success and this new rule that comes out: while it doesn’t change our decision-making too much, I think that the forcing of more groups into downside risk earlier, is a mistake, I don’t think it will save the treasury that much. There will be a study released next week by NAACOS [the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of ACOs] that will show significantly greater savings than what Medicare has shown to date. This study uses a methodology that MedPAC and the Innovation Center have used—they look at a matched cohort—and it will show almost twice as much savings in the MSSP than has previously been shown. It also speaks to the policy point—organizations are truly saving the government money, even if it doesn’t immediately show on paper. The evidence doesn’t support the idea that ACOs should be kicked out because they have a bad benchmark. The true savings to the Medicare Trust Fund will then be less. And that’s what they need to focus on, achieving true savings to the government.
And where will this appear?
I think it’s going to come out in Health Affairs. I’m familiar with it through NAACOS, which helped fund it.
