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Featured topic and speakers
What are the benefits of home health care? What is the demand for home health? What does home health care include? What are the top issues confronting hospitals?
Our guest is Isaac J. Myers II, MD, the chief health integration officer of Baptist Health and the president of the Baptist Health Medical Group. AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger hosts.
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Speaker
- Isaac J. Myers II, MD, chief health integration officer, Baptist Health; president, Baptist Health Medical Group
Transcript
Dr. Myers: When I think about home care from a Baptist Health standpoint and our vision, it's really about meeting the needs of our patients and being able to provide them with the right care at the right time and the right place.
Unger: Hello and welcome to the AMA Update video and podcast. Today, we're talking about Baptist Health's big investment in home health services and its impact that it's had so far. Our guest today is Dr. Isaac Myers, the chief health integration officer of Baptist Health and the president of the Baptist Health Medical Group in Louisville, Kentucky. I'm Todd Unger, AMA's chief experience officer in Chicago. Dr. Myers, it's great to have you with us today.
Dr. Myers: It's great to be here, Todd. I'm really excited about being here today.
Unger: Well, I had the chance to meet you last week at AMA's Annual Meeting, and it's great to follow up with you here on camera and learn more about what you're doing at Baptist Health. Before we get started, I thought chief experience officer was an interesting title, but you have an interesting title too, chief health integration officer. What exactly does that mean?
Dr. Myers: Well, I think I was given that title because when I initially came to and joined Baptist, it was president of the medical group, so just managing the position enterprise. And within the first year, because of my background, I was given the opportunity to manage our health plan and our value-based care side of the business and case management and other things.
And so we kind of decided what would be the best title. It should be more than the chief medical officer. So we came up with the chief health integration officer as the title.
Unger: That makes a lot of sense. And you have a pretty wide view of how things are going. And that's probably very important about the topic we're going to discuss, which is meeting patients where they are with—
Dr. Myers: Oh, absolutely.
Unger: Tell me a little bit—tell me a little bit more about how you define home health, what that means at Baptist Health.
Dr. Myers: Yeah, I've been involved in home care for a number of years, well before I even came to Baptist Health. Matter of fact, my wife is a home health administrator for over 22 years. So a lot of work involvement with home care, my professional background.
But when I think about home care from a Baptist Health standpoint and our vision, it's really about meeting the needs of our patients and being able to provide them with the right care at the right time and the right place. And it just happens that many times, that's in the home.
And so with that, we have nurses, we have therapists, we have social workers that's able to go into the home to help patients with their recovery and to really advance their ability to take care of themselves and also provide education to them and their family to help them with services. And so when I think about home care, it's just providing right care, right time, right place, good quality, good service and outcomes, and the convenience of location for the patient and their family.
Unger: And that sounds like a lot of excellent objectives. This year, you also announced a partnership with Alternate Solutions Health Network to enhance the services that you're talking about. Tell us more about the partnership and what it entails.
Dr. Myers: Yeah, Alternate Solutions Health Network, this is really a good partnership for us. As we looked at our home care services, we realized, as the population continues to grow and age, that we needed to be able to advance our capabilities in a way that would be very efficient from a management and a technology standpoint.
From a Baptist standpoint, we have had excellent home care services, excellent outcomes. And in March of this year, the joint venture came to together with Alternate Health Solutions Network. What they bring to the table is the expertise, national expertise, technology that kind of coincides with our capability and services.
So what it does collectively is allow us to build upon what we've already done, grow our business model and continue to deliver excellent quality care and service to our patients from the home care perspective.
Unger: Now, you mentioned what each partner brings to the table, so to speak. Why was the timing right to do this now?
Dr. Myers: Well, I think the timing was right mainly due to the fact that we realized that we needed to grow our service. And we need to do it in an efficient, kind of cost-effective manner. And so that led us to thinking about, what's the best way to do this? We could keep adding resources. We had technology. Technology was advancing.
And as we went out and looked into the market—we call them ASHN. They really had excellent technology, excellent quality outcomes, excellent references. And we're all about joint venturing when the opportunity is right. The nice part about the joint venture is that we maintain our Baptist name. So it's still under Baptist Health. And in the four markets that we serve, we're just now able to advance our capabilities with better technology, continuing to provide high-quality service.
Unger: That makes sense. So you could really scale that operation quite quickly with the partner that's bringing that technology to the table.
Dr. Myers: Absolutely.
Unger: And I know it's early. This just went into effect in March. But do you have a sense of how it's going so far?
Dr. Myers: It's going fairly well. I mean, we have been spending most of our time, since this is only a couple of months, just really educating our staff as they adjust to a new partner because ASHN, they're actually managing the process. So the staff has had to adjust to new technology. And that seems to be going well.
We've had really good outcomes even prior and continue to advance with our outcomes and being able to help patients do better with their care in the home and all the quality management side of things. So I feel really good about where things have gone since our engagement with ASHN.
Unger: Now, you're part of the Integrated Practice Physicians section, and I know from meetings that they've had here at AMA that value-based care is always a big priority. Talk about how—how does this investment in home health support the work in value-based care?
Dr. Myers: Well, when you think about value-based care, you still want to deliver high-quality care in a very cost-effective manner. So what this actually allows us to do is, again, continue to deliver high-quality care. We have great technology, so it allows us to have the efficiency from the diagnosis, the operation aspect of the business and continuing to provide great outcomes with our patients.
So this is kind of a win-win scenario, best-case scenario. So we're helping with the quality of care. And at the same time, we're being very cost-effective in our business process.
Unger: Now, you're obviously seeing a lot of value already from home health services. I'm curious, when you think about the future and you think about expanding it, are there a certain set of things that you're doing right now that you're going to expand? Or is it the number of folks that you're treating? How do you think about expansion?
Dr. Myers: Well, I mean, when we think about expansion, it's more the being able to take on more volume in the same period of time and looking at our volume and growth. With what we've been able to do with our joint venture and their technology and the efficiencies that come with the technology that they bring to the table, we're able to track things in a more efficient manner. We're able to gather information, coordinate the care in a more efficient manner.
So this is really very, very exciting for us. And so this is what we want to do. We want to be able to not only deliver care, but we also want to be able to help patients with a better transition, less readmissions in the process, which also ties to value-based care side of the business, where you have less hospital readmissions or visits because you're really able to better manage those patients' care at home.
So this is what we're able to do with this joint venture. And then we have the data and the reporting side of it, where we're able to track and trend and report on what we're doing. So if you see anything that you need to tweak, I mean, the data itself and the capability is so significant.
Unger: Now, last week, you met with a number of other health system leaders from across the country at AMA's Insight Network event that took place at our Annual Meeting. I'm curious if there were any key priorities or learnings that you took away from that.
Dr. Myers: It was the first time I've gone to an AMA meeting in a long time. It's been a while. And I tell you, the summit was—I came back so energized from that particular meeting, one, because I really felt like it was done at a very high level that addressed a lot of the concerns that we're faced as a health system.
And to hear other systems talk about what they're doing in certain areas, from access to care, from technology, the challenges that they're facing, I mean, just some really great ideas. Matter of fact, I met with a group, and I had a strategy meeting yesterday with my neuroscience team. And we talked about one of the things that was presented at that meeting regarding same-day visits using your advanced practice clinicians.
But you do it in a way that you think of a specific diagnosis that you're comfortable with them treating and being able to see patients same-day. We're going to implement that from the neuroscience. Everyone is really excited about that. But that's just one of the many things that came out of that conference. But I thought it was very well-done. And it was just enough. It wasn't too much. Great fellowship. And made some good connections from a networking standpoint.
Unger: Well, Dr. Myers, it certainly sounds like you enjoyed and found the meeting valuable. And I was excited to meet you. And we really appreciate you coming on the show today and letting us know how things are going at Baptist Health.
Dr. Myers: Oh, thank you. And thank you for your time today. Enjoyed it.
Unger: Well, if you found this discussion valuable, you can support more programming like it by becoming an AMA member at ama-assn.org/joinnow. That wraps up today's episode. We'll be back soon with another AMA Update. Be sure to subscribe for new episodes and find all our videos and podcasts at ama-assn.org/podcasts. Thanks for joining us today. Please take care.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this video are those of the participants and/or do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the AMA.
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