Arizona Provider Practices Awarded for Tech Enabled Advances in Value Cased Care

Published: December 5, 2019

Practice users of HealthBI’s CareEmpower care coordination technology are recognized for achieving key milestones; awards presented to winners by Jami Snyder, Director of state’s Medicaid agency

Phoenix, Arizona, December 5, 2019 – Arizona providers are leading the way in evolving our nation’s healthcare into a proactive, preventive model, announced HealthBI®, the technology division of whole-health delivery system Equality Health. Multiple practices in the fully integrated Equality Health Network were recently awarded for their effective use of HealthBI’s care coordination platform, CareEmpower®, to advance value-based care at the practice level.

The Equality Health Network is made up of medical and behavioral health provider practices that are equipped with support, training and the CareEmpower platform to successfully work under risk-based contracts.

The awards were presented by special guest Jami Snyder, Director of the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), which is the state’s Medicaid and CHIP agency. Under her leadership, Arizona is at the vanguard of motivating practices to embrace proactive, value-based healthcare.

“These award-winning practices exemplify the Arizona model for whole-person health. Equipped with the right support, training and technology, they are proving that value-based care is most effective when driven at the practice level,” said Doug Duskin, president of HealthBI.

Awards were given for the following categories:

Spirit of Cultural Care Award — Awarded to Providence General Medicine for delivering care that respects the cultural values of members, and for effective use of sociocultural risk assessment tools embedded within CareEmpower. Based on the screening results, members are connected to the appropriate resources.

Clinical Documentation Master Award — Awarded to Kyrene Internal Medicine for excellence in documentation and coding for risk-adjustment. Providers in the Equality Health Network receive extensive support and training for HCC coding and other documentation essential for meeting risk-based contracts.

Equality Care Award — Awarded to Canyon Pediatrics (large practice category) and George Roso, MD (small practice category); both of whom exemplify proactive healthcare through their consistent follow-up with patients who have recently been discharged from a hospital. This follow-up is enabled by member admission/discharge/transfer alerts from CareEmpower.

Flash Start Award — Awarded to Tucson Clinica Medica Familiar (Tucson winner) and Gonzales Medical Clinic (Yuma winner) for accelerated adoption of CareEmpower and the Equality Health Practice Performance model.

Reforming healthcare at the practice level

CareEmpower is used by providers to proactively manage, coordinate and transition patient care for large complex patient populations—and to close the gaps in care that exacerbate poor health outcomes, inequalities and high costs. Provider offices and community resource managers use CareEmpower to coordinate care and services for members; to access the full picture of member health, including clinical and medication history and social determinants of health; and to swiftly follow up when the platform deploys an alert of a member’s hospital admission or discharge.

Nationally, HealthBI’s care coordination platform is the provider enablement technology offered by the nation’s four largest health plans. Close to 70,000 clinical sites in every state have deployed CareEmpower technology to identify at-risk patients and the appropriate interventions, and to coordinate care plans with other providers.

In Arizona alone, CareEmpower coordinates care for over 1 million lives, serving as the care coordination platform for five of the seven AHCCCS Medicaid plans. It provides crucial support to help providers prove and meet their risk-based contracts under the AHCCCS model of care that emphasizes integration of physical and mental healthcare with community resources.

“CareEmpower helps us keep an effective work pyramid. My staff has really come to rely on it for flagging areas that need attention so I can spend my time making medical decisions,” said George Roso, MD and primary care practice owner in two locations, Gilbert and Mesa.

Gonzales Medical Clinic’s practice manager, Sandra Lopez, explained that CareEmpower has considerably enhanced the practice’s ability to proactively address patient needs. “Sometimes we don’t get a complete picture from our electronic medical records. CareEmpower lets us see exactly how we are doing; for instance, when we’re moving out of range for our A1C screening targets. That kind of visibility prioritizes our activities,” she said.

Monique Delgado, Senior VP of Network and Operations at Equality Health, also congratulated the practice award winners.

“We celebrate these practices for leading the way to better outcomes for patients and our communities. They prove the power of primary care to change how healthcare is delivered when aided with the right tools, support and funding,” concluded Delgado.

About HealthBI

HealthBI was founded to unify fragmented healthcare systems and help care teams succeed in an increasingly outcomes-driven world. Since 2012, HealthBI’s care coordination technology has been deployed by the country’s largest payers to support practices and the community in improving the continuity of care and optimizing value-based performance across more than 20 million Medicaid, Medicare and Commercial lives, including some of the most complex populations in the nation.

HealthBI is a division of Equality Health, the Phoenix-based whole-health delivery system that deploys HealthBI’s flagship CareEmpower solution to enable culturally competent, value-based care for underserved populations. Learn more at www.healthbi.com and follow HealthBI on Twitter and LinkedIn.