In this episode of the Move to Value Podcast, we talk with Marque Macon, MBA, FACHE, Assistant Vice President, Atrium Health's https://www.carolinasphysicianalliance.org/ (Collaborative Physician Alliance), who discusses the importance of using support teams to assist providers in value, including accurate documentation and coding. Hi Marque. Can you give a brief overview about the Collaborative Physician Alliance? Sure thing. Well, Collaborative Physician Alliance, or CPA as we like to refer to ourselves as, we are a physician-led, clinically integrated network, focusing on collaboration to redesign healthcare for better quality and efficiency, better health for our patients, better satisfaction for our providers, and better value for all. We are made up of about 2,700 physicians, 2/3 are employed by Atrium Health, and about 1/3 are what we consider affiliates. These affiliates are community physicians with whom we share patients. Together, we have about 300 physician practices and over 370,000 covered lives in our value agreements, and we are anticipated to grow to over half a million covered lives by 2023 and 2024. Since our first performance year in 2017, we have achieved over 136 million dollars in total savings and over 8 million dollars in pay-for-performance incentives. How does CPA use population health data and analytics to create strategies to promote health equity and access to care? Well, we often like to say that we have the holy grail of data. Through collaboration with our payer partners, we have access to robust claims information which is really helpful as we understand the disease prevalence of our population. We also leverage real-time clinical data through our Electronic Health Record and will have even more capabilities as we transition to a standard Electronic Health Record across our enterprise. Additionally, we lean into the expertise of various teams in developing strategies to promote health equity and access to care, by including Atrium Health’s Population Health and Analytics team, our Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), and our community and social impact team. For example, based on our research, we know that when it comes to hypertension, there is a higher prevalence of uncontrolled hypertension among African Americans within our Greater Charlotte region. This data also shows that there is a higher prevalence of patients in hypertensive crisis among this population as compared to white patients. And we see similar trends in our diabetes population. So, Atrium Health’s Equity Executive leadership, in partnership with the Quality & Equity of Care Committee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Hospital Association. These boards requested a focus on Health Equity. And as a result of our findings, the Greater Charlotte Region selected Hemoglobin A1c control and Diabetic Blood Pressure control in African American patients as areas of focus.

Healthcare mergers and practice acquisitions are happening with greater frequency. What impact can this have on the provider and the patient? Yeah, sure. So, for the most part, healthcare mergers and practice acquisitions have had favorable impact on providers and patients, particularly within Atrium Health. Since 2018, we have expanded our footprint through strategic combinations with Atrium Health Navicent, Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, and most recently, Atrium Health Floyd. So, now Atrium Health has over 70,000 teammates across the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama and have 38,000 patients encounters each day – that’s about one patient encounter every two seconds. We’ve also leveraged our economies of scale to experience a cost avoidance of overhead and IT expenses, provide greater access to care, and increase our influence with our payors. These efforts have allowed us to move closer to achieving the triple aim: improving the patient experience, delivering high quality, and managing our medical costs. And by expanding our...