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6-System Partnership to Cover 9 in 10 WI Residents

 |  By John Commins  
   August 11, 2014

Jeff Thompson, MD, CEO of Gundersen Health System and chair of the as yet unnamed partnership—not a merger or an acquisition—discusses the coalition's intention to improve quality of care, reduce costs, and collectively "get better faster."

 

Jeff Thompson, MD
CEO of Gundersen Health System

Six Wisconsin healthcare systems that provide healthcare access to 90% of the people in that state have formed a strategic partnership to improve clinical quality and lower costs.

Jeff Thompson, MD, CEO of La Crosse-based Gundersen Health System and chair of the partnership's board of directors, stresses that the affiliation "is a true partnership among our six organizations, not a merger or consolidation. It will allow us to more rapidly learn from each other, share best practices, and serve the needs of patients and families more efficiently."

The partnership's founding members are:

  • Aspirus – Wausau
  • Aurora Health Care – Milwaukee
  • Bellin Health – Green Bay
  • Gundersen Health System – La Crosse
  • ThedaCare – Appleton
  • UW Health – Madison

A commercial insurance plan for the six organizations is being offered through Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield's Blue Priority network, and will be available through brokers, the federal Health Insurance Marketplace, and private health insurance exchanges.

The partnership intends to expand coverage options, and is evaluating other insurance carriers and administrative products. The partners are also open to extending membership to other healthcare organizations that can demonstrate delivering quality, value-based care.  

Thompson says the partnership was developed to build on and advance clinical quality, efficiency, and customer experience attributes that are documented and shared among the six organizations.

In addition to providing healthcare access to most of Wisconsin, the six partners serve people in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota. Each partner system uses the same electronic medical records system, making it easier for patients to access their records and share with doctors in the network.

Thompson spoke with HealthLeaders Media about the partnership soon after the announcement. The following is an edited transcript.

HealthLeaders: Why did Gundersen join this partnership?

Thompson: When we first started, the talk was about putting together an insurance network. We felt like if it was going to be an insurance network we weren't interested. We were already in a variety of networks.

But if you are interested in developing a group of organizations that do not want to spend all of their time with the merger, governance, and asset allocation and all that kind of thing, but want to spend their time improving care and lowering costs, then there are some real possibilities.

We talked around that for a while and felt that being an organization that could have an insurance product and eventually take risk across a broader population had some real advantages.

But probably the biggest advantage for our patients and our organization was to put together a group that all had the ability and track record of quality improvement and working on cost reductions and saying, 'If we all commit to making each of us better, how we can get better faster?'

That is what we believe we can accomplish and that is why we came together.

HealthLeaders: Is there a specific agenda as this partnership progresses?

Thompson: That all has not been completely designed out. We do have a number of subgroups under the new organization. A business group has already formed and chosen a leader for supply chain. We are all in buying groups, but we do believe there are some things in the supply chain and contracting that as a group we can do better at and find where each of us are saving.

Our quality committee has already met and will work on making sure our data connects and that we have the same definitions. They've already started their conversations about where we might be able to get the most improvement. We believe there is an opportunity for the groups to focus in certain areas. We just haven't designated those. We expect in the next couple of months to have that started.

HealthLeaders: What does this partnership mean for healthcare consumers in Wisconsin?

Thompson: I don't think most of that will change hardly at all, at least not right away. The earliest thing that will occur is the network will have a relationship with the [Anthem] Blue Cross and Blue Shield Blue Priority insurance product.  But at no point did we say we are going to limit it to a single insurance product. It's not about insurance products. It's about trying to become better more quickly. So we believe that that will come first, but there will be more opportunities afterwards.

There will be an advantage for those employers who have employees spread across the parts of five states that these organizations cover. And the state of Wisconsin could be served by this group as well.

HealthLeaders: Will this partnership facilitate other collaborations?

Thompson: That is a potential. We all recognize that. But we believe that right now, as things are changing rapidly, as the opportunities are there, our focus is best left on making care more reliable and bending the cost curve down. If we as a group can work together on that, then those other things will either happen or not.

Whether we are part of a big organization or not is less important to our communities. What is important to our communities is that the care be even more reliable and the cost of the care becomes less.

HealthLeaders: Where do you see this partnership in five years?

Thompson: We have the potential to prove that you don't need a merger and governance and asset changes to cooperatively accomplish things that are part of all of our own missions.

We all have a mission to take care of patients in our communities and we believe that will drive us to great performance. It will be likely that other people will ask to be a part of this when they see our success, so it is likely we will grow. But again, our target is not to become big. Our target is to become better, faster.

HealthLeaders: Are you saying that being under one ownership arrangement is irrelevant?

Thompson: Certainly trying to get to that adds a ton of complications and we don't believe it necessarily helps us.

We believe right now with the strong commitment to boards of the organizations, the CEOs, the senior leadership of the organizations, that we can improve more quickly, we can take out costs, and that all of the complexities of governance and asset changes and all of that are not going to slow us down because we aren't doing that.

HealthLeaders: Does this partnership require government approval?

Thompson: We've checked with a number of lawyers and they don't believe it does, because we are not merging and we are not sharing price data and things like that. But we are working on quality improvement.

We are working on sharing best ways to reduce costs. We will all have multiple outside partners, so we believe right now that it does not come even near the gray areas of antitrust issues. Besides, there are other giant competitors in the region.

John Commins is a content specialist and online news editor for HealthLeaders, a Simplify Compliance brand.

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