January 1, 2011 the CMS in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act released the Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule for the implementation of Medicare's New Annual Wellness Visit. This was supposed to be the ignition for physicians, clinics and hospitals to get prepared to hit he start button to engage at minimum their regular Medicare patients to complete their Annual Wellness Visit.
The Annual Wellness Visit itself is much different than a Physical or the unpopular Welcome to Medicare Visit that patients are accustomed to after joining the Medicare Program. After 4 years of information and encouragement to get providers to participate in the program we have now come to the point where true tracking of the program implementation will begin. Our company VC Medical Group is a Medical Service company who have implemented a seamless program to assist physicians, clinics, hospitals and ACO's to be able to increase their Medicare population participation. Why is this important, currently if you are in the Medicare population you are going to the doctor for these reasons: 1) if you are sick or think you are sick, 2) if your spouse or children are pushing you to get your preventive care, 3) if your provider has implemented programs where someone designated on their staff reaches out to the Medicare patients quarterly. The ladder is few and far between simply due to staffing and the amount of work functions an office already takes on. This is why when physicians foresee all the "new changes" coming they become frustrated and unsure of how they will manage the additional changes that are due to be places on them.
We have targeted the Annual Wellness Visit Screen and the Chronic Care Management program and we have found a way for this to be a way to help the provider adjust to the ACA program as well and increase patient participation. In 2014-2015 Medicare participation for the Annual Wellness Screen nationally was 16%. Providers think they are servicing their patients but they are normally only performing this screen when the patient comes in on his/her own.
Our Healthy Plus program is unique and provides a significant amount of additional help with contacting and engaging the current patients. Nothing changes in the provider's current setup other than we establish what days and times the certified medical assistant, nurse practitioner or medical staff personnel the physician prefers to perform the visit. We train your staff to use the software, and we customize the data points that the provider, clinic, or hospital system would like to gather so that is highly effective in evaluating the current Medicare population.
The reason for the Healthy Plus program rise in popularity for ACO's is due to the ability for our program to meet 29 of the 33 required measures. As with all the ACO's the goal is to implement more actionable preventive care plans by earlier patient engagement which in turn will allow the ACO's to participate in the organizations "shared savings". With our Healthy Plus program we have assisted several ACO's in reaching these measures allowing them to share in the savings.
As we have kept a close eye on CMS the program for AWV is a very highly affective program and can be a significant tool for providers who are seeking to engage their populations in better preventive care. CMS will start to begin the scrutiny on reporting patient engagement as well as patients utilizing the CCM program. With the "clinical triggers" program as a major part of the software you will be able to immediately determine what plan of follow up visits to be used for each patient.
Our Healthy Plus program has started to pave the way to help providers implement this program and eliminate a lot of the heavy lifting. The movement of the medical world is striving towards better preventive care.
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