A venture by Independence Blue Cross and a company ranking well in Warren Buffett's portfolio is getting underway, in an ambitious attempt to optimize the benefits of primary care.
Tandigm Health, a joint venture started by Philadelphia-based Independence Blue Cross and Davita HealthCare Partners, has established a new primary care network across southeastern Pennsylvania, in multi-year agreements signed with 270 individual primary care physicians.
These "founding physicians" are being asked to work in collaboration with Tandigm Health through disease management programs and "organized systems of community-based care," as other docs are recruited, the company said.
Tandigm's management model is similar to the patient-centered medical home, and aimed at reducing duplication, improving the patient experience and preventing health crises that lead to emergency room visits and acute care.
"We are ready to put our experience and proven methods to work in Philadelphia to create a personalized experience with better clinical outcomes for the patients," said Kent Thiry, co-chairman and CEO of DaVita HealthCare Partners, in a media release. "We will give primary care physicians the tools and support they need to achieve a new standard of highly coordinated care."
Tandigm was founded this past spring as what IBC CEO Dan Hilferty termed an unprecedented partnership between an insurer and provider.
DaVita, a publicly-traded company headquartered in Denver, is well known for its vast network of dialysis centers as well as for one of its largest investors, Warren Buffett, who owns about 17 percent of the company's shares. The operation has also seen successful business growth its HealthCare Partners division, which manages medical groups and physician networks in California, Nevada, Florida, Arizona and New Mexico, with a coordinated primary care model that IBC executives hope can be applied to care for its members in greater Philadelphia.
Registered under the DaVita umbrella and led by one-time IBC senior vice president Anthony Coletta, MD, Tandigm is trying to both leverage the expertise and claims data of Independence Blue Cross and follow the primary care model DaVita has used in other states.
The inaugural network of primary care doctors "significantly advances Tandigm Health's physician-centric coordinated care model, which we have created to reward doctors for delivering more personalized, superior care to their patients, emphasizing the quality of care, not the quantity of care," said Coletta, a surgeon and internist who worked as chief medical officer for Holy Redeemer Health System before coming to IBC in 2012.