If the road to economic viability, meaningful use, and accountable care organizations is a rocky one for most healthcare facilities, it’s perhaps even bumpier for rural ones. That’s why the Colorado Rural Health Center (CRHC) has created the “Partnership Program,” which will allow larger organizations to invest in a fund that will be used to provide free support services to small, rural health facilities.
“We have a lot of programs and services that we don’t have grant funding to be able to provide for no cost,” Cari Fouts, director of communication and development at CRHC, said in an interview. These services include helping rural health clinics improve their billing and coding practices, assessing and improving business practices; and helping with quality improvement and patient safety activities.
Even though CRHC provides such services throughout the state, rural facilities often can’t afford to pay for the help and CRHC hasn’t been able to provide it for free; that’s where the Partnership Program funding comes in.
“This partnership is going to allow us to be able to provide those services and technical assistance out into the rural communities,” Fouts said.
In all, there are 29 critical access hospitals in Colorado, plus nine additional rural hospitals, and 50 certified rural health clinics. In other words, there are a lot of facilities that might need help. Although eventually the program will have an application process, CRHC will use its current field work start by identifying facilities in need.
The first “Partner” in the program is Englewood, CO-based Centura Health, Colorado’s largest healthcare provider with 13 hospitals, several clinics, and other programs, including rural health facilities, which span the roughly 104,000-square-mile state. Plus, they have rural health facilities themselves. According to Bob Wallace, Centura Health’s service line director for outreach health, the organization has contributed $25,000 to the fund for 2011.
But they’ll likely be providing more than funding, Wallace said in an interview, by reaching out to rural communities to find determine their most pressing needs and how they can help.
“It could be anything ranging from telehealth issues,” he said, “as well as things like community health assessment. As those small rural hospitals go down the road to health reform, we and the Colorado Rural Health Center want to be resources for them.”
Fouts says Centura Health is the first of what CRHC hopes will be many partners.
“70% of the state is rural or frontier, so there’s a lot of need here,” Wallace said.
Could this program pave the way for these facilities to form accountable care organizations? Possibly, said Fouts, but that’s not its main objective. Before they can even get to that point, she said, these facilities need to meet basic needs and stabilize their businesses.
“A lot of facilities just struggle day-to-day keeping their doors open,” she said. “So they really need to have all of this infrastructure set up with their IT systems and with their billing processes and really be running smoothly before they are going to get to that level of being an ACO.”
Moreover, ACOs were never an impetus for the program anyway.
“We have had this as one of our strategic goals for years and years,” Fouts said, “way before anyone ever knew what an ACO was.”
Among the free services CRHC’s Partnership Program will provide are:
- Billing and coding assistance
- Healthy clinic assessment, which looks at all business practices, starting with answering phones and checking in patients
- Improving patient satisfactions
- Studying cycle times to make sure patients are being seen most efficiently
- Improving adherence to care guidelines and chronic disease management
- Improving quality, processes, and patient safety
- Assisting with health IT adoption, including helping facilities choose the right system; get the right system upgrades; qualify for meaningful use; working with vendors on contracting; and analyzing data to improve patient outcomes
- Assuring correct policies and procedures are in place to ensure Medicare/Medicaid compliance
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
