By Matt Cox (Chief Marketing Officer, Lumeris) and Nigel Ohrenstein (Senior Vice President and head of Market, Lumeris)
Health system and health plan leaders across the country are asking the same question: how will our organizations survive and thrive in a value-based world? As the shift to lower-cost settings accelerates and the population becomes older and sicker, organizations are seeking new ways to manage costs, generate income and control quality.
For many organizations, launching a Medicare Advantage (MA) plan paves the way for value-based care models that reward delivering better care at lower costs by combining clinical and financial expertise. As enrollment in MA continues to outpace traditional Medicare enrollment – with national MA penetration growing from 30 to 50 percent in the next 10 years – organizations must have a strategy that enables success in the future.
Benefits of a Medicare Advantage plan
MA is increasingly viewed as a potential growth area for organizations. While launching a plan certainly carries risk, it also offers significant upside for providers and payers to successfully manage the health care needs of members.
With an average annual premium of $10,000 per member according to a Lumeris study, MA enables provider-sponsored plans to manage the risk of a population. Access to comprehensive claims data can be used to identify high-risk patients and areas of high utilization, supporting an organization’s population health efforts and steering patients in-network. With aligned incentives, organizations can innovate and invest in care delivery with tools and workflows that support high-value, appropriate care.
Further, MA’s sophisticated risk adjustment methodology supports premium payments that reflect the expected cost of providing medical care to each member, including those with complex conditions. Proper risk adjustment requires providers to capture diagnoses accurately and completely to support reimbursement.
Finally, with Star ratings, well-managed MA plans that earn 4- to 5-Star ratings can attract more members and revenue through enhanced benefits. Highly-rated plans receive performance bonuses that bring in an extra five percent a year, which are used to provide additional benefits to members.
Consider creating a plan built around a collaborative model: one that aligns incentives, bolsters the provider-payer-member relationship and enables delivery of high-quality, cost-effective care.
Building blocks for a provider-sponsored plan
Establishing a provider-sponsored MA plan is a significant undertaking. Given the large investment of time and money, organizations considering launching a plan must ensure they have several foundational elements in place. Consider creating a plan built around a collaborative model: one that aligns incentives, bolsters the provider-payer-member relationship and enables delivery of high-quality, cost-effective care.
Organizational and market strategy
Before launching a plan, organizations must evaluate their tolerance for risk and ability to capitalize said health plan. A strong brand reputation in the market is obviously crucial, but additive resources and significant infrastructure are also required. Organizations should also consider market dynamics, population growth and reactions from key players – competing systems, provider groups and other payers – and how these factors impact their strategy as a differentiated plan offering in the market.
Operational experience
Considerable infrastructure is required for claims processing, actuarial analysis and utilization management, among other payer functions, which can be leveraged from working with a collaborative payer or operating partner. In MA, expertise in Star ratings, risk adjustment, sales and marketing, compliance and plan design add further complication to successful operations. To build the right foundation, provider-sponsored plans must focus on enabling the provider-payer-member relationship, often requiring innovative processes on everything from data transparency and aligned incentives, to coordinated care management programs and shared governance.
Engaged network
Core to a collaborative model is ensuring organizations are aligned. Managing a health plan requires organizations to focus on improving patient outcomes and monitoring the entire population, not just the patient in front of them. Fostering the right network and governance, aligning incentives to create mindshare, sharing best practices and information, and supporting new workflows and behaviors are all critical to success in value-based care delivery.
Partnering for success
Before launching a collaborative MA plan, organizations must assess capabilities to identify gaps in knowledge, expertise and operations. For most organizations, working with an operating partner is more effective than building internal MA competencies from the ground up. Finding a partner with skill and experience in launching a collaborative plan can enable organizations to gain a competitive advantage more quickly. It can improve the likelihood of success while limiting risk and enable providers to focus on their core strength of delivering high-quality, high-value outcomes.
One example of bringing these necessary capabilities together is the newly announced collaboration between Cerner, a global leader in healthcare technology, and Lumeris, an award-winning health plan and value-based care managed services operator. Under the relationship, the companies will provide a suite of offerings under the name Maestro Advantage™, designed to enable health systems and health plans to drive success in value-based arrangements through population health service organizations or provider-sponsored plans. The offerings combine Cerner technology and Lumeris operational services aiming to streamline redundant processes that burden members, payers and providers, including lengthy claims processing and reimbursement cycles, and obstacles to sharing data and records across any electronic health record in the network.
This post originally appeared on September 19, 2018, as the second in a series of sponsored guest blog posts on our Convergence conference blog.
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