The Healthcare Financial Management Association’s ANI: The Healthcare Finance Conference may be geared toward providers, but some of the education sessions in this month’s conference in Seattle may coax them towork more closely with the payer population.
“In the past the payers have been on their own, trying to get the physicians to practice more efficiently and effectively, (but) now the hospitals have been joining in,” said Terry Fouts, MD, chief medical officer for MedeFinance and a speaker at session D03: “Engaging Physicians Through Analytics and Identification/Coaching Physician Champions.”
Fouts’ session will teach providers how to develop robust, valid and credible data sets that are applicable to physicians and can be used to align incentives.
“Payers have been telling physicians that they really need to look carefully at how they practice and benchmark themselves (against) their peers,” he said. “Payers are now more aligned with providers and how efficiently they practice.”
Another session that stresses the importance of the payer in the healthcare world is Session B05: “Hospital-Physician Alignment Strategies.” This session is designed to let payers know they are no longer alone in the battle to get providers to align their practices and incentive payments.
“We’re going to spend about a quarter of the time covering where payment reform is going with the Obama administration and what models we’ve been able to do that with,” said session speaker Brett Hickman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP. “The industry needs effective incentives that really change and create sustainable value and cost.”
Hickman intends to outline steps for the implementation of an incentive-based payment system.
Payers have been taking a more active role in how they integrate with providers around future disease management. The patient comes first, said Hickman. The payers really are there to create the right incentives for good care and quality.
“There are no new dollars for healthcare, but the volume will rapidly increase from the patient perspective,” he said.