--
Newsletter Highlights
Introducing Clinical Integration
Dear Colleagues:
We want to share some exciting news with you about a unique opportunity to work collaboratively to strengthen care delivery for our community. This opportunity is called a Clinically Integrated Network (CIN).
In keeping with UPMC Pinnacle’s tradition of partnership, a diverse group of physician
representatives were invited to participate as members of the Physician Leadership Council of the CIN, laying the foundation for Concert. With the primary objective of increasing collaboration around shared quality goals, Concert has been formed in such a way that it will be a physician-led, professionally managed organization with representation from primary care and medical, surgical, and hospital-based specialties.
Over the next several months, you will be hearing more about the benefits of a CIN and how you can join. We urge you to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and participate in building a strong future for our patients and our community.
Sincerely,
CIN Physician Leadership Council
You can view our newsletter here: Spring 2022 Newsletter
Past newsletters:
Clinical Integration:
What Does It Look Like?
A CIN is a legal arrangement that allows hospitals and physicians to collaborate on quality and efficiency improvement while remaining independent entities, where such activity is reasonably necessary for them to achieve efficiencies that can benefit their patients as well as local payers and employers.
The CIN Board of Managers will include both physicians and system executives, with the majority of seats held by physicians. This board will serve as the governing body for the CIN. In collaboration with UPMC Pinnacle, physician-led committees will:
Identify and develop clinical quality programs for the performance analysis of particular conditions and populations.
Develop systems to monitor compliance with adopted clinical quality programs on both an inpatient and outpatient basis.
Enhance collaboration among medical staff to improve acute care delivery processes and outcomes.
Enter into contractual arrangements for value-based care and shared savings in a way that financially recognizes the physicians’ efforts to improve care quality and efficiency.
Introducing Concert,
a Clinically Integrated Network
Big changes in health care are ahead. As healthcare continues to emphasize value-based care delivery and reimbursement, it is more important than ever for healthcare organizations to strive for enhanced quality and greater value for patients, providers, payers, and communities.
That’s why physicians and healthcare organizations across the country are developing Clinically Integrated Networks (CINs). Concert, a local CIN formed by physicians in partnership with UPMC Pinnacle, creates a platform that allows healthcare providers like you to work collaboratively and legally across the continuum of care, removing barriers to the coordination of patient care and increasing the efficiency of care delivery.
Concert will involve independent and health system-employed providers working collaboratively, sharing data, and holding each other accountable for performance against physician-developed and approved clinical quality and efficiency standards.
A group of physicians has begun to lay the groundwork for Concert’s quality program by reviewing and selecting specialty-specific initiatives that “align with local quality efforts, national standards and programs, and CMS program and regulations. Concert will build consensus around this quality program for best practices and reduce variation in care delivery as we move toward the goal of delivering high-quality, cost-effective care to our communities.
In addition, Concert has begun to plan the development of a health information technology infrastructure to secure, collect, analyze, and understand data from all participating providers across the continuum of care. We are establishing ways for providers to drive change and improve care based on this data. Despite being a significant investment, the IT infrastructure development is critical to creating a platform that will serve the needs of this partnership now and into the future.
As the network continues to develop, the CIN provider participants will deliver significant improvements in quality and effectiveness, while promoting increased accountability to patients. An essential part of this development will be for the CIN to establish new contracts with payers to drive value-based care that will augment, but not replace, existing fee-for-service contracts currently in place with providers.
Also, these initial contracts will help lay the groundwork for Concert to continue to evolve in the future to financially sustain comprehensive population health management activities that will continue to transform care in our community.