Northern Light Health and Optum announced a strategic relationship to enhance the healthcare experience for patients and providers throughout Maine. As part of this relationship, select Northern Light Health employees will become part of Optum, providing them with new opportunities for growth and career advancement while they continue to support Northern Light Health.

Premier has been a long advocate for the movement from volume to value and supportive of alternate payment models that incentivize this movement. Today’s announcement from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center (CMMI) extending the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) Advanced model for an additional two years is a welcome move that will allow current participants to continue in the program and new healthcare providers to join. Strong partnerships between health systems and specialists facilitate a team-based, coordinated model of care delivery that supports the continued movement to value-based care. By providing an ongoing means to engage specialists in population-based efforts, the BPCI Advanced model will continue to align incentives to innovate the care delivery process, reduce costs, and improve quality and patient satisfaction.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that the Medicare Shared Savings Program, through its work with Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) – groups of doctors, hospitals and other health care providers — saved Medicare money while continuing to deliver high-quality care. Specifically, the program saved Medicare $1.66 billion in 2021 compared to spending targets. This marks the fifth consecutive year the program has generated overall savings and high-quality performance results.

CAQH released the ninth annual report measuring the progress healthcare payers and providers are making to use electronic business processes. The 2021 CAQH Index found that adoption of electronic administrative transactions increased on average by 2.3 percentage points across the medical and dental industries. This shift was driven, in part, by the challenges of virtual work environments during the pandemic.

athenahealth and Advanced Pain Care announced a partnership that will support APC’s mission to deliver comprehensive, focused patient care while enabling the organization to drive operational and financial improvements across APC’s growing footprint.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to undermine performance improvement efforts at hospitals and health systems across the country. Supply chain disruptions and shortages have driven up prices and forced a return to the costs of carrying larger inventories of needed supplies.

SSM Health and Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, announced an innovative collaboration focused on making quality care more accessible and affordable for people across the Midwest.

When describing the amount of revenue cycle data available to healthcare organizations, many providers use words like “massive” and “daunting.” The reality is that providers have access to more data than ever before, yet they often don’t know what to do with it. There are literally hundreds of revenue cycle metrics that healthcare organizations can […]