How value-based care with a team approach injects humanity back into patient care

From the age of 10, I knew I wanted to be a physician. It started with my desire to help others and improve their lives, and I’ve had the privilege to do just that in a variety of healthcare settings.

It was in the emergency room where I found my purpose, and from the moment I started my first ER rotation, I knew I was in the right place. It was also in the ER where I first experienced the pains of treating patients who, through no fault of their own, were struggling to get the coordinated holistic care they needed and were coming to the ER as their last option.

For a physician, practicing medicine can at times feel like you’re steering a boat that has a leak. You find the hole and select the right tools to fix it, but just as you repair one, another leak springs. The next thing you know, you’re running around plugging leaks while trying to navigate what’s ahead.

A value-based care model can help address the challenges both patients and physicians face by expanding the capacity of the clinical team with more support, tools and resources. Value-based care allows for meaningful extensions to practices. Now, clinicians gain a team at the watchtower, maintenance support to identify leaks before they happen and a reliable route that helps them avoid choppy waters. Such support and investments for the entire care team allow for value-based care to be delivered optimally to our patients.

Embrace technology and data to identify issues before they begin

Working in collaboration with a value-based care network allows clinicians to begin to not only manage care at the individual patient level, but at a population level.

Technology plays an important role in this model of care, serving as the enabling glue that holds it all together. A value-based care partnership often provides clinicians with access to more robust technology platforms, giving them additional data insights that support care coordination and disease management. Electronic medical records don’t always paint a full picture or actively show gaps in care, and certainly not across a clinician’s or practice’s population of patients. It takes a comprehensive platform to pull patient information together and connect the dots.

For clinicians, it’s empowering to see patient panels in a different way. They’re given the tools that highlight the opportunity at the population level for patient screenings, chronic disease services or addressing social determinants of health. This additional thread of information gives clinicians the insight to tap the right intervention and engage partner resources to help their patients stay well.

With additional tools to help them analyze gaps in their patients' care, monitor ER visits, and track admissions and discharges, clinicians gain more information to get out in front of potential issues and proactively engage patients in their wellness plans. They also can more easily track against quality measures.

Extend your crew with value-based care

Clinicians have been practicing value-based care strategies for decades. They work hard and provide great care to their patients. But trying to do so within a fragmented healthcare system has proved more than challenging. Increasingly, they’ve had to spread themselves thin to cover all facets of care delivery for their patients. By participating in a value-based care network that extends their team, they gain allies with a shared mission to deliver the best outcomes possible for patients.

With access to extensions of their practice such as social services, care managers and in-home visits, they have the additional support they need and deserve to serve patients both within and outside of the clinic walls. There is now an entire team available to help with the workload that had previously been tasked to an individual clinician, with everyone dedicated to the same patient goals.

A population view of opportunities, combined with partner resources, helps clinicians connect patients with the clinical and nonclinical programs that are truly going to have an impact on their lives.

Enjoy the ride

As a healthcare community, we’ve come a long way to better support clinicians by adding capacity to their practices. Value-based care networks offer a path forward for clinicians to access the team, technology and insights that allow them to serve patients in the way that inspired them to go into healthcare in the first place.

Partner with Optum to extend your reach.

About the author


Dr. Meredith Williams is a practicing emergency physician and president of Optum Care Network in the Midwest. By remaining close to patients and care delivery, she remains cognizant of and connected to the challenges of transforming healthcare and the need to address physical, social and behavioral health drivers of health.

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