In North Carolina, a new joint venture between a payer and a managed services business aims to help independent medical practices transition to value-based care. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC) and Deerfield Management Company of New York are forming a team to aid independent physician practices.
- Range of challenges: In today’s market, independent physician practices face a range of challenges to maintain their operations. This joint venture will help independent physician practices develop essential capabilities for value-based care such as care coordination and contracting.
- Joint venture: “As we think about this joint venture with Deerfield, it offers an opportunity to get providers out of a cycle where they can focus on their job of providing quality care to patients and leave administrative tasks to a different organization—an organization that is run by this joint venture. This new organization can take care of everything from scheduling to hiring staff, to making sure rent is paid. All of those administrative tasks are handled—allowing the provider to spend time with patients,” says Von Nguyen, MD, MPH, senior vice president and CMO of Blue Cross NC.
- Value-based care: The joint venture will support independent physician practices in their journey to adopting value-based care, says Adam Grossman, MBA, a partner at Deerfield. “This is a multi-year process that requires a lot of infrastructures to support practices as they adopt new tools and resources to make the transition to value-based care. So, whether it is helping practices to evaluate the right technology tools, helping practices with relationships in the provider community, or helping practices with contracting, there are several areas where support is needed.”
- Potentiality: “For technology, COVID provides another good example of the potential of the joint venture. Telehealth was all the rage during the pandemic, but there are many platforms for providing telehealth, including Zoom, Skype, WebEx, and Teams. The joint venture can help physician practices choose the right virtual solution,” says Von Nguyen.
- Qualitative support: Another top goal of the joint venture is supporting independent physician practices in the shift to value-based care, Nguyen says. “In value-based care, you need to think about new capabilities that you need to bring to bear. You need to make sure that you have enough dollars in the bank for when you have bad years. You need to think about care coordination differently.”