On the Road to Risk, Summit Medical Group is Driving in the Fast Lane
At Summit Medical Group (SMG), the oldest independent multispecialty physician group in New Jersey, Jeffrey Le Benger, M.D., has been providing high-level leadership for 16 years. With more than 800 providers at 70 locations, multiple comprehensive ambulatory care campuses and a strategic partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center, SMG handles more than 1.5 million patient visits annually. Its officials believe that its performance is marked by a sustained enhancement to clinical quality and patient outcomes, ongoing participation in emerging value-based reimbursement initiatives and meaningful cost containment.
Indeed, after devising and refining a highly effective practice management and patient care model at SMG and extensively studying the condition of mid-range and large-scale independent physician groups nationwide, Dr. Le Benger spearheaded the formation of Summit Health Management (SHM) in 2014 to share SMG’s formula for success via strategic partnerships and customized managed services contracts. Now, Le Benger serves as chairman of the board and CEO of Summit Health Management and Summit Medical Group.
SHM is now poised to become a national organization, with the aim to positively impact the delivery of patient care across the country, as Le Benger envisioned, with the 2017 establishment of a major agreement with the Bend Memorial Clinic in Oregon and an alliance with Arizona Primary Care Physicians (APC) that resulted in the formation of Summit Medical Group Arizona.
In a recent interview with Healthcare Informatics, Le Benger outlined the progress and evolution of his organization and how it is continuing to plunge ahead into the world of risk and value-based care. Below are excerpts from that discussion.
How is your organization progressing when it comes to taking on risk for your patients?
We are at a point in which 65 percent of our patient base is based within risk-based contracting, and it’s a continuum, so you have fee-for-service and then percent to premium is on the other side. And then there are all aspects of risk in in between; there is pay-to-play, shared savings, and full risk. Most of our contracts that have upside and downside risk have a shared savings component. But as soon as we increase the size of our attribution and can mitigate our risk more evenly, then we will look to go to percent to premium as a group.
Jeffrey Le Benger, M.D.
Can you detail the ACO (accountable care organization) work that you’re involved in?
We are a part of the Trinity Health ACO [which serves patients in Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey and Ohio], and are in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)’ Next Generation ACO Model. Over the past two years we have received shared savings and we do take on upside and downside risk. The issue with Next Gen is that you are benchmarked against yourself [rather than against outside ACOs], so you have to improve [internally] every year. In Medicare Advantage, you are benchmarked against the community that you have the product within. So the house always wins. The government knows that shared savings pushes the envelope, but the cost to create that savings far outweighs the savings they get in a trend demonstration.
What are your thoughts on the recent CMS proposed rule for ACOs? Do you think it’s too aggressive or fair?
We are a large group of [nearly] 900 providers that is fully integrated and not consolidated, so pushing into risk is not an issue. We are already capable of handling more risk in the organization. But when you have a consolidated network, or an individual doctor or smaller group, the amount of data analytics that’s needed to manage risk is financially unaffordable. For a hospital institution, I think you will find that they will have a hard time on the payment schedule as they move towards risk on fair market value. So the small practices will have to figure out how they will consolidate into a larger group to help defray some of their costs for the data analytics they need to do in order to take on risk.
How are you currently handing MACRA/MIPS?
We are in an advanced alternative payment model (A-APM) since we are in Next Gen, though we still have physicians who come on that are required to do MIPS. For us, we have the data analytics to handle it and we have achieved a fair amount of savings in MIPS. Now they are moving to bundling programs, so we can manage that with the data analytics that we have. The government has demonstrations to see what makes sense and what doesn’t, and then you have all these practices figuring out how they could justify moving in and out of all the programs, and where the best economic value is. And it doesn’t mean you will have the best quality outcomes, but rather you are looking to move to the program where you see the best economic value.
How are things progressing with Summit Health Management?
[In 2014], we broke out all of management from Summit Medical Group and we started Summit Health Management. It started with 500 employees, and we have full coding compliance, we audit within it, as well as having all revenue cycle, accounting, and MSO (managed service organization) services within it. Also within it is a large population health department that we offer services to the three groups that we have MSA agreements with: Summit Medical Group New Jersey, Summit Medical Group Oregon, and Summit Medical Group Arizona. So we can scale the commitment and the resources within the management company to the three groups in order to run what is needed in that organization for its value proposition.
Each location is different, so we are ahead of the curve with upside and downside risk in New Jersey, with 65 percent of our population at full risk. In Oregon, it’s a little bit of shared savings and a little pay-to-play, and in Phoenix, besides the MSSP (Medicare Shared Savings Program) product and managed Medicare, on the commercial side it’s only a little pay-to-play. So we are able to adjust and scale what’s needed in the different organizations in the management company.
What are the keys to having 65 percent of your patient population in New Jersey at full risk?
It has to do with the governance and leadership of the organization, and how we structured the culture as an all-for-one. We also don’t differentiate in how the doctor sees a patient from the PPO world versus the HMO world. In all of our products, we heavily manage the sickest percent of the patient population, and we decentralize preventative care in the organization. We see it as “payer-blind” in terms of how we compensate within the organization. So they do not know who is a fee-for-service patient and who is an HMO patient because we don’t want to make a distinction on how they care for the patient. And that was culturally how it was developed in the group.
And on the back end, yes, sometimes we do a little more care management for one [side] or the other because it’s [needed], but we do try to manage all patients the same way. We know that all of our payers will eventually move to higher risk, so when you are in the fee-for-service world, these payers know what the total cost is because claims adjudication is still based in a fee-for-service world.
[Essentially], you are still putting in individual claims, but you are rolling up all those costs and then comparing it to your total costs to the total costs on the outside. If you cannot demonstrate savings to a payer, even in a fee-for-service world, they will go after your rate structure, and you essentially will be at risk because you will lose revenue if they decrease your reimbursement in that program.
How important are payer-provider relationships? Have they improved in recent years?
You cannot look at your payer relationships as adversarial when you are in a large group practice. Think of them as your partners, because as all insurers move to high-deductible or employer-based [plans], you have to look at how you achieve savings moving forward. When you look at shared savings, who is benefitting in the shared savings? It has to either be either the employer, the insurance company, the beneficiary, or the provider.
We are in a full-risk contract with Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield in New Jersey, and they are a very good partner. We have more than 60,000 attributed lives who are at full risk with Horizon in the state, and we have seen that we have lowered the cost of care with this product over the past five years, and we have consistently beat the market in lowering the cost of care. So the payer is happy, the employer base is happy and the individual, who might not realize it, is happy because we look at the sites of service and we lowered the out-of-network or deductible cost for that patient.
