Providence Southern California Joins Vivity ‘Virtually Integrated’ Health System

Providence Southern California has joined Anthem Blue Cross’ Vivity Health Plan, which brings together multiple hospital systems in a joint venture to collaborate on clinical quality goals and care coordination.

Offered as an HMO product for employer groups in Southern California, Vivity says it is the first-in-the-nation joint venture between a health plan and like-minded health systems aligned to enhance the health of members. It uses a provider reimbursement structure that includes shared savings from community risk pools and creates a “virtually integrated” health system.

The addition of Providence marks Vivity’s first expansion since it launched in 2015, bolstering the plan’s provider network offerings and collaboration in Orange and Los Angeles counties. Other members of the Vivity group include Cedars-Sinai, PIH Health, Torrance Memorial Medical Center, Huntington Hospital, and UCLA Health. Established as an LLC, all joint-venture partners share equal ownership in the governance of the organization.

“This partnership complements our strategy to deliver a high-value network of care focused on keeping people well and providing them the highest quality and coordinated care when sick,” said Prub “P.K.” Khurana, chief strategy officer, Providence Southern California, and chief executive, Providence St. Joseph Health Network, in a statement.

With the addition of Providence, Vivity now offers members access to Providence’s network of 746 primary care physicians, 2,800 specialists and nine hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties. In addition to the inclusion of Providence as a joint-venture partner, Vivity recently contracted with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital located in Valencia to increase its coverage area.

Vivity partners are working on improving data sharing. Through the HL7 Da Vinci Project, they are among the payers and providers working to shift legacy document-focused data-sharing efforts to FHIR implementations. Earlier this year Healthcare Innovation covered an HL7 FHIR DevDays presentation by Ray Duncan, M.D., Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s director of technology research and development, as he described the use cases his Los Angeles-based organization has chosen to prioritize with Anthem as part of the Vivity HMO and the heavy lift the transition involves.