Venture Will Focus On Population Health Improvement

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

The joint venture is meant to improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.

According to the Boston Globe, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care has announced a joint venture with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Elliot Health System, and Frisbie Memorial Hospital to create Benevera Health, a population health improvement company. The new company will manage the clinical and financial data across the organization with the goal of improving care and lowering costs.

According to a press statement, “Benevera Health is an innovative partnership among health insurers, hospitals and caregivers leading the way in containing healthcare costs while improving the quality of healthcare. It is not an insurance product but rather a population health improvement company owned and operated by its partners and will take healthcare coordination to a new level by bringing together clinical, financial and operational data from across partner institutions to provide actionable analytics for clinicians to further improve the quality and efficiency of patient care.”

The data will be available to providers to aid in proactive care for Harvard Pilgrim's 80,000 enrollees in New Hampshire. As part of the Benevera Health joint venture, the participants will invest more than $10 million in staff and infrastructure to get the company running and share the profits according to Harvard Pilgrim President and CEO Eric Schultz. The deal will involve hiring about 40 healthcare professionals to serve as patient care advocates.

“As we work toward managing and improving population health — and not just health care — collaboration among patients, providers and payers is becoming increasingly important,” noted Dartmouth-Hitchcock CEO and President Dr. James N. Weinstein. “Our goal of creating a sustainable health system — one that improves the lives of the people and communities we serve, for generations to come — is advanced greatly by initiatives like Benevera Health.”

Benevera Health’s approach to population health improvement will:

• provide health care clinicians with access to more robust information about best practices and care outcome patterns to guide their care recommendations
• offer outreach by trained New Hampshire healthcare professionals to address emerging, complex or chronic health issues and identify appropriate solutions
• establish thoughtful member health monitoring systems to allow timely health care intervention to reduce the need for urgent care, thus reducing costs and providing better health outcomes
• provide information to allow members and their physicians to make informed choices about specialty physicians, facilities and treatments based on associated outcomes
• allow for comprehensive analysis of payer and provider data to optimize care delivery and cost, based on the New Hampshire patient experience

“The goal is to vastly improve patient care in New Hampshire by injecting personnel and new technology that will provide doctors and other clinicians with the information they need to help their patients make the best choices about their healthcare,” Schultz said.