2020 Acclaim Award Honoree

HealthPartners has incorporated AMGA’s High-Performing Health System™ attributes into their multispecialty practice in the following ways:

Efficient Provision of Services

• HealthPartners utilizes National Quality Forum (NQF)-endorsed measures to assess its performance. By monitoring total cost of care, HealthPartners can identify practice variation and work to understand drivers of cost.

Organized System of Care

• Clinical care teams have developed and tested standard work and shared protocols for the most common clinical conditions in their areas. They outline roles and evidence-based care practices that provide the highest value results as measured by affordability, clinical outcomes, and patient experience data. These protocols are embedded into EHR tools to make care as simple and as affordable as possible.
• HealthPartners created a podcast series to demonstrate how to have non-polarizing conversations while doing what is right for the patient. Topics included reducing costly and unnecessary diagnostic tests, recommending initial treatments that are less intensive and invasive, and revising treatments plans based on a change of care goals.
• HealthPartners developed two preferred post-acute care networks to ensure continuity of care for patients discharged to transitional care units.
• As part of its work to develop community partnerships within all of its clinics, HealthPartners created a community partnerships toolkit and is providing training for all of its sites.

Quality Measurement and Improvement Activities

• HealthPartners uses an improvement plan to track its performance. In each of the clinical areas identified by the plan, a series of improvement initiatives are conducted to carefully analyze practice gaps, develop solutions, test interventions, and evaluate results. Populations who could most benefit from more targeted quality improvement projects are defined. Each clinical area includes a registry list that assists care teams in identifying patients, addressing their care needs, and measuring patient outcomes based on optimal standards of care.
• HealthPartners has developed standardized measurements across its entire medical group—with results transparently available at the department, site, and clinician level and reported to a number of external groups.
• HealthPartners has a longstanding Health Equity Sponsor Group. The approach includes collecting data and eliminating gaps in care; supporting language access; building an understanding of equity, diversity, inclusion, and bias; and partnering with communities.

Care Coordination

• Over the past 10 years, HealthPartners has undergone a care model redesign that focused on team-based, patient-centered care, often referred to as health care home. A number of specialty roles have been embedded in primary care based on the needs of specific clinics, including diabetes educators, pharmacists, community health workers, dietitians, care coordinators, and behavioral health staff.
• HealthPartners has embedded a Social Determinant of Health wheel and a Community Resource Directory into its EHR. These enable a care team to assess needs and document in a way that can be visible to other care team members.
• Care teams have also been involved in practice-based research to advance and better understand how the organization can support a culture of shared decision-making.

Use of Information Technology and Evidence-Based Medicine

• HealthPartners supports “expert panels,” led by a physician/administrator dyad with clinical representation across relevant departments. The panels meet twice a year to identify clinical guidelines, review clinical indicators, collect and share best practices, review key strategies for improvement, and recommend EHR tools to support best practice.
• In 2019, HealthPartners launched e-consult, a new pathway for internal consultation between clinicians. E-consult technology allows HealthPartners to provide a simple and affordable option for specialty care to their patients and health plan members.

Compensation Practices

• HealthPartners’ physician compensation formula is based on patient satisfaction, patient access, and quality metrics, as well as citizenship work. Administrative and clinical executives are able to participate in an incentive plan that includes performance metrics across the dimensions of people, health, experience, and stewardship. The plan includes workforce diversity goals at the leadership and professional levels.

Accountability

• HealthPartners is currently participating in the Next Gen ACO program, and was one of only 41 health systems in the United States selected by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) for the Pioneer ACO program.
• Over the past three to five years, HealthPartners has performed successfully under a variety of outcomes-based contracts with multiple payer partners in their local market. Their contracted relationships have included shared savings or “total cost of care” programs, along with quality programs that include negotiated measures and targets for both clinic and hospital services/metrics.