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WHS building bridges with other health systems to benefit patients

3 min read
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Washington Health System is helping to build bridges.

“We are looking at four health systems that are strong individually getting together to do something to improve population health management,” said Charles Vargo, interim executive director of Bridges Health Partners, a partnership forged among four independent, nonprofit health systems in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

WHS announced Monday it is joining forces with St. Clair Hospital, Butler Health System and Excela Health System to form a clinically integrated network that would provide better quality patient care at a lower cost.

“We will be operating on a larger scale with like-minded partners that will be financially beneficial,” added Vargo, who also is executive director of Washington Physician Hospital Organization. “The goal is to look at things across a large population of patients and see patterns and trends. We can look at, say, diabetics on a group level.

“We can spread this across four health systems. We can all do our own thing or do something together. Sharing will make this pretty powerful.”

Vargo could not estimate how large that patient population may be for the partners, but it is potentially significant. Those four health systems serve residents of 13 counties in this corner of the state: Washington, Greene, Allegheny, Fayette, Westmoreland, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Clarion, Indiana, Lawrence, Mercer and Venango.

There are seven licensed hospitals with more than 1,200 in-patient beds in this service area, Vargo said. During the past fiscal year, he added, the four systems discharged 64,000 patients and more than 300,000 emergency patients.

The partnership had been in the works “for the better part of two years,” said Gary Weinstein, WHS president and chief executive officer.

“I would put it in the context that changes are taking place in the health-care system now,” he added. “We’re seeing a demand from the public expressed through Medicare and the government and health-insurance providers.

“We’re asking doctors to take better care of (patients), and not just episodically. They want us to be more proactive. During treatment, they want us to say, ‘Mrs. Jones, you have some risk factors here, and if you don’t take care of them, there could be problems down the road.’ This takes new skills and technologies.

“As we looked at how to be proactive, the best thing seemed to be to look to like-minded partners who want to be independent, locally governed and take care of people in communities regardless of insurance.”

Bridges Health Partners is in the development stage, and will be for months. It will not serve the public until Jan. 1, 2018.

Vargo said there was a meeting Monday on a first project, forming a Medicare accountable care organization across the four systems. Data have to be gathered for Medicare. Staff also will be hired to run the organization and to provide care-management and care-coordination activities.

Weinstein is pleased “to be at the starting line. Now, we have to prove we can actually manage care at a higher quality and at a lower cost. That’s what people ultimately want.”

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