More than two dozen rural hospitals in Ohio and West Virginia formed a clinically integrated network, which providers are increasingly turning to instead of health system-led acquisitions.
The Ohio High Value Network, announced Thursday, is a 26-hospital collaboration designed to provide the purchasing power, patient volume and clinical expertise needed to reduce costs, reinforce alternative payment models and boost care quality. Similar coalitions formed in Minnesota and North Dakota over the past two years.
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The Ohio High Value Network offers hospitals the scale to compete with larger organizations while maintaining their independence, rural hospital operators said. This model gives a voice to rural hospitals and preserves local decision-making, which may be lost in health system-led acquisitions, they said.
“Bringing our hospitals together will give us more buying power and leverage to work with group purchasing organizations,” said Jeff Graham, president and CEO of Chillicothe-based Adena Health. “When we have the scale to lower costs, we can invest more in quality of care measures.”
Leaders from Cibolo Health, an advisory firm that helped create the North Dakota and Minnesota networks, will manage Ohio High Value Network’s daily operations.
The network will form clinical and business integration committees made up of representatives from participating hospitals. Those committees will oversee clinical and quality initiatives, as well as shared services linked to supply chain, staffing, IT and other administrative departments.
Initial goals include closing care gaps, increasing access to preventative medicine and reducing the total cost of care, executives said. The Ohio rural hospital coalition hopes to achieve some of the goals through value-based care models, which rural providers often can’t pursue because they don’t treat enough patients or don’t have the resources to give insurers the necessary data.
Similar alliances in Minnesota and North Dakota have led to Medicare shared savings contracts and Medicare Advantage quality-based payment models with major insurers, said Nathan White, president and CEO of Cibolo and former chief operating officer at Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Sanford Health.
“Rural hospitals are looking for an avenue to survive in value-based care models, which are often out of reach because those organizations lack scale,” he said. “Together, as a collaboration of independent hospitals, we can create scale."
These types of alliances will become even more valuable as Congress and President Donald Trump's administration consider federal spending cuts and policy changes that could overwhelm rural hospitals, such as reducing Medicaid funding, said Myron Lewis, president and CEO of Findlay-based Blanchard Valley Health System and board chair of the Ohio High Value Network.
“There is no more pivotal time to come together,” he said. “It is really important we are as efficient as possible and focus on high-quality care. We can do that better collectively than we could do individually.”
