Moving health care toward greater integration soon will be crucial for improving costs, quality and access to care, Mayo Clinic Health System CEO Robert Nesse, MD, told physicians earlier this month during the 2014 AMA Annual Meeting.
Physicians are becoming increasingly accountable for the value of care and the results of care, making a move from the traditional price-driven health care model important, Dr. Nesse said. He explained that the old model of care was slow to innovate, slow to react and not based on outcomes. System integration will be the opposite: patient-centered, value-driven, health-oriented and physician-accountable.
By moving to team-based care, he said, physicians will be able to make the decisions about how to slow increasing costs, rather than being at the mercy of regulators and the industry.
“[In the current environment,] we’re having our practice and its effectiveness defined for us by people who do not practice,” Dr. Nesse said. “These are folks that ask us to look at things that are important to them but not important to our doctors or patients.”
But the move to implement integrated care models isn’t easy. Dr. Nesse shared the experiences of the Mayo Clinic.
“We had to go all the way back to our values and mission statements,” he said, pointing to how the health system added integrated care language to their company’s credos. “We had to go back about 100 years, and that really helped us. But it took a lot of work.”
Dr. Ness said those moving toward integration should focus on a few fundamentals for success:
- A network of physicians and other health care professionals—both physical and virtual
- Alignment of purpose
- Coordinated care delivery
- Financial alignment
Physicians seeking more information about how to implement new care delivery and payment models can take advantage of educational webinars and practical guides from the AMA Innovators Committee.
Through its Professional Satisfaction and Practice Sustainability initiative, the AMA is using its influence and leadership to protect the integrity of medicine and medical practices of all sizes. The AMA is developing practice-level solutions that, when applied collectively, will help enhance the practice of medicine for physicians and enable informed decision-making about their practice environments.
