Healthways Puts Focus on Providers

Healthways is broadening its business model as it prepares for the loss of its Cigna contract, which over the course of the 14-year relationship grew to represent about 20% of Healthways' annual revenue.

The giant wellness program and disease management provider just announced a 10-year strategic agreement with Texas Health Resources (THR) to implement physician directed population health management.

Details of the agreement, including specific measures of success, are still being worked out, according to Jon Scholl, chief strategy officer for Arlington, TX-based THR, but will generally include claims analysis for its physician practices, risk modeling,  and health coaching.

The non-profit THR system includes 24 acute care and short stay hospitals in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. It employs 550 physicians and contracts with another 5,000. It generated $3.7 billion in totaling operating revenue in fiscal year 2011, but Scholl says that despite its substantial size, THR considered the idea of developing its own population health program to be a daunting task.

"There are a lot of things that are needed to manage the health of populations, including information systems that intake and analyze claims and risk modeling. Those are things that Healthways brings to us in this partnership that Texas Health Resources would otherwise have to invest behind."