The Benefits of Advanced Primary Care for Employers

In a recent article for Benefits Pro, Dr. Scott Conrad hits the nail on the head – our existing primary care system is broken and it is costing employers money. As he notes he’s experienced first-hand, the current fee for service primary care system is one that is overloaded with too many patients, supported by perverse financial incentives, and delivering care that is episodic and reactive, leaving ticking time bombs within a covered population.

As you approach your renewals and think about ways to boost the overall success of your group health plans, consider for a moment that an innovation exists that genuinely changes how care is delivered, yielding better health and lower costs for your clients. Advanced Primary Care is the key to unlocking outcomes that matter.

R-Health finds itself aligned with the key attributes of the Advanced Primary Care model as highlighted by Dr. Conrad and suggested by the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions. Our Advanced Primary Care innovation dares to challenge the status quo and as a solution, we work to make major changes to the primary care delivery system itself.

  • R-Health caps each of our physician’s patient panels at one third of that of a typical family doctor. This gives the patient back precious time in their day when they’re not waiting for an hour for a 15-minute visit to discuss a complex health issue. R-Health’s wait times are typically less than 10 minutes, and our physicians know their patients by name, spending upwards of 30 minutes to an hour with patients. Further, the smaller patient panel allows for a personal R-Health doctor to be available outside of normal business hours for virtual care.
  • R-Health doesn’t get paid on a fee for service basis. Instead, partnering with R-Health typically yields a fixed per member per month fee. This allows our physicians to focus on the quality of care being delivered, never the quantity of patients being seen in a day.
  • R-Health delivers care that fosters authentic, long lasting relationships with patients and takes proactive steps to engage people in their healthcare. Our physicians have the time to focus on a patient’s lifestyle and provide disease-based coaching, working to encourage behavior modification.

R-Health has the infrastructure to leverage robust data with state-of-the-art technology to effectively manage your population over time.

This technology takes quite a few forms here at R-Health, but brokers might best appreciate our proprietary clinical intelligence platform, HealthyData™, which takes data sets including clinical, claims, and patient level info and aggregates it into one source of actionable information. From a population health management perspective, this is a critical component, allowing us to risk stratify the population and provide proactive outreach and care to those deemed to be within High Risk and Rising Risk categories.

As the article asserts, it is true that “with improved primary care, other stakeholders in the system lose when less money is spent on things like imaging, specialist care, inpatient care and prescription drugs.” So when you are called on and charged with the seemingly insurmountable task of controlling costs and reducing spend, consider implementing R-Health’s Advanced Primary Care solution. You’ll find the better health outcomes, lower claims spend, and primary care revitalization you’ve been seeking.