Background
One of Salem Health’s long term objectives is to increase the quality of care we provide to patients, while lowering the cost of care and providing better outcomes. This is something you may have heard referred to as “the triple aim.”
There are all kinds of barriers to achieving these big goals: care that patients can’t access in a timely manner, provider time, the expense of managing patients in a hospital setting and limited financial resources.
No matter the challenges, federal payment systems are forcing health care to embrace population management by tying reimbursement to outcomes.
Population management is the strategy Salem Health is relying on to overcome these barriers and fulfill the triple aim.
What’s the next step for Salem Health in population management?
This year’s goal at Salem Health is to increase patient access through partnership and collaboration. We can reach this goal by increasing the number of covered lives in primary care by partnerships within the state from 15,453 to 170,000.
How does Salem Health make this goal a reality?
We are focused on three tactics to increase the number of covered lives at Salem Health:
1. Decrease the time it takes patients to access primary care and specialist providers in our network.
Salem Health will continue the test of change with care teams, streamline scheduling through online check-ins, and develop a plan to implement virtual care.
2. Increase the number of clinical partnerships.
Salem Health will seek partnerships to expand our network and increase access.
3. Continue to develop the infrastructure needed to implement population management.
Salem Health will build clinical workflows and develop benchmark dashboards, while developing a method to utilize new federal payment models for population management.
That’s a mouthful, we know. Hopefully this gives you a bird’s eye view of Salem Health’s population management strategy. We will be going into more detail with this and other strategies over the course of the year.