CommonSpirit Health announced this week the launch of a value-based care platform that will spread and support best practices learned during recent years across the Catholic giant’s 24-state footprint.
Called Population Health Services Organization (PHSO), the platform will provide a range of services such as population health analytics, network management, data management, tech infrastructure and reporting, the nonprofit said.
“We are leveraging the national scale of CommonSpirit and our expertise in value-based care across diverse, community-based health system environments in order to elevate the standard for healthcare in the U.S. and help providers succeed in value-based care,” CEO Wright Lassiter III said in the system’s announcement.
CommonSpirit’s existing footprint in the value-based care space spans full risk-bearing organizations, 10 accountable care organizations and over 2.6 million covered lives, as well as clinically integrated networks (CINs) and integrated delivery networks in each of its geographies.
The nonprofit—which operates 145 hospitals, over 2,200 care sites and is among the country’s largest providers of care to Medicare- and Medicaid-covered patients—also highlights $474 million in savings it has generated across five years of participation in the Medicare Shared Savings Program.
“Coupled with our reach across 24 states, we can use the data and tools and access to a broad patient population to take on critical national health issues that require the size, scale and depth that we can deliver,” Thomas McGinn, M.D., executive vice president of physician enterprise at CommonSpirit Health, said in the announcement. “For example, we can leverage data to understand patterns in testing, referrals and treatment to develop interventions that reduce viral infections like Hepatitis C which disproportionately impact our most vulnerable populations.”
The new platform will be “an acceleration” of those efforts and other population health work that CommonSpirit has built up during recent years, Derek Novak, system vice president of population health services, told Fierce Healthcare.
Of note, he said the platform will also bolster coordination across the CINs’ CommonSpirit-employed and independent providers, the latter of which the system said it expects to grow within its networks going forward.
“We know we’re going to be in a position to really have a strong foundation from which to work from,” Novak said. "We really see the clinically integrated networks and the PHSO continuing to move value-based care forward throughout CommonSpirit, and [as] an opportunity for greater engagement of independent providers as well.”
Novak and CommonSpirit highlighted the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ goal for most, if not all, of its program beneficiaries to be under some kind of value-based care arrangement by 2030. PHSO’s unveiling is “a catalyst” and “a commitment” to move CommonSpirit further in that direction so it will be ready to meet the growing demand for better outcomes and lowered spending, he said.
“We feel that we’ll have one of the more diverse portfolios working with a population health services organization to provide equitable health outcomes and really supporting the high quality and coordination of care for millions of patients across the country,” Novak said.