​DOYLESTOWN, PA – Health Quality Partners (HQP) announced today a strategic planning project to accelerate adoption and scale the Advanced Preventive Care (APC) model. The project is made possible through a $1 million grant from the Peterson Center on Healthcare. APC is a technology-supported model that uses community-based nurses to manage chronic conditions, avoid complications, and improve the quality of life for rising and high-risk older adults on Medicare. APC has been rigorously evaluated across multiple studies and achieved significant improvements in quality outcomes and reductions in cost of care for Medicare patients with multiple chronic conditions. Through scaling APC, HQP aims to advance its mission to improve healthcare quality and experience for patients and their families, particularly among vulnerable populations.
 
“In our 18-year history, we have been focused on rigorously designing, testing, optimizing, and replicating APC,” said Dr. Ken Coburn, Co-founder, President & CEO, Health Quality Partners. “With the changing reimbursement landscape towards value-based care and growing population of chronically ill older adults, the market need for innovative systems of care like APC has never been greater. This project will allow us to reach even more patients and further position HQP as an innovator in healthcare delivery redesign.” 
​
“With its randomized controlled longitudinal studies, proven outcomes, replication successes with both health plan and hospital partners, and strong leadership team, HQP is well positioned to support others interested in adopting APC,” said Eric Heil, SVP Global Growth and Opportunity, who recently joined Health Quality Partners to lead this effort. “APC is a turn-key system that can address the rapidly increasing demand for population health programs that extend medical care and social services into the home and result in proven outcomes that drive meaningful financial and clinical returns.”
 
According to Mark Humowiecki, who leads the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs, an initiative of the Camden Coalition and long-time collaborator with Health Quality Partners, “as the healthcare industry further integrates payers and providers, any healthcare organization that assumes financial risk of the total cost of care for patients they serve has a growing demand for care management services and solutions like APC, especially for rising and high- risk patients. Through our collaboration with HQP, we are excited about supporting the spread and growth of APC.”
 
About Advanced Preventive Care
For the past 18 years and with over $30 million invested, HQP has created a highly effective and innovative system of care called Advanced Preventive Care (APC) for rising risk patients on Medicare. In a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) 12+ year randomized controlled trial (RCT), APC was shown to reduce hospitalizations (-39%), deliver net savings (-28%; -$397 PMPM) and lower mortality rates (by -34% at two years, and -22% at five years) among higher-risk chronically ill older adults compared to those receiving “usual care.” A recent Commonwealth Fund report on 18 models that have had the most success in managing complex, high-need populations identified HQP’s Advanced Preventive Care model as having the highest level of evidence among an elite set of programs.
​
Given that the 65 and older Medicare population is expected to grow from 55 million in 2015 to 79 million in 2030, the scaling of APC presents a unique opportunity to make a tremendous impact on healthcare outcomes and spending across the country.
 
APC combines clinical expertise, hands-on care management support, and a technology infrastructure to support provider organizations such as Doylestown Health and integrated payer-provider organizations like Martin’s Point Health Care in replicating APC to improve the overall value of care provided to their most challenging patient populations. Medicare managed care plans, integrated payer-provider organizations, and provider organizations in alternative payment programs (such as accountable care organizations or direct contracting entities) can also benefit from APC.
 
HQP helps adopting organizations with its proprietary turn-key implementation technology that enables: rising risk patient identification, mobile staff management and productivity, population health training, patient education, clinical data capture, care planning, dynamic reporting tools, and more. HQP’s implementation technology was designed to ensure a potential partner’s success in managing a field-based team for population health programs and replicating APC with successful financial and clinical results.   
 
About Health Quality Partners
Founded in 2001, Health Quality Partners (HQP) is a leading non-profit service provider and research and development organization committed to designing, testing, and disseminating more effective systems of preventive care. HQP’s system of Advanced Preventive Care using community-based nurse care managers better controls chronic conditions, avoids complications, improves health, reduces suffering, and provides truly person-centered care with more than 35 best-in-class evidence-based treatments to help seniors manage complex health and social needs.

About The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs
The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs, launched in 2016, aims to improve wellbeing for individuals with complex medical, behavioral, and social needs. An initiative of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, it works to coalesce the emerging field of complex care by bringing together a broad range of clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and consumers who are developing, testing, and scaling new models of team-based, integrated care. The National Center and its staff collaborate with other experts across the nation to develop best practices, inform policy, and foster an engaged and accessible community to develop this work and teach it to others.
 
###
 
For additional information, email [email protected], visit www.hqp.org/contact-us.html or call at (267) 880-1733.
 
@HQP_tweets
https://www.linkedin.com/company/health-quality-partners/
https://www.facebook.com/healthqualitypartners/

By Ken Coburn, MD, DrPH, FACP, CEO and Medical Director at HQP

Case managers can make important contributions to the much-needed redesign and transformation of the U.S. healthcare system. By preparing themselves for this role, and working within an organization committed to pursuing such change efforts, case managers will be well-positioned to help lead these transformation efforts.  

How can we transform the U.S. healthcare system into one that achieves better population health outcomes for the money spent? Health system redesign and transformation is required. Continuing to deliver more healthcare services in the same way that we have won’t help. Instead, we must create new care delivery models that recognize and address a fuller array of health determinants and risks to health. We must better address the underlying root causes and latent failure modes that lead to avoidable deteriorations in health and functional status, and to the preventable ER visits, hospitalizations and deaths common among higher-risk populations.

Could such a "radical" approach to redesigning care delivery work? Yes. Such care delivery models have already been designed, implemented, rigorously tested and proven to improve the health outcomes of targeted populations. Take, for example, the model of Advanced Preventive Care (APC) developed by Health Quality Partners (HQP), a non-profit organization dedicated to undertaking the research and development needed to create innovative models of care that improve the health of higher-risk populations. APC has been shown in longitudinal randomized controlled trials to reduce hospitalizations (-39%), net costs (-28%) and mortality (by -34% at two years, and -22% at five years) among higher-risk chronically ill older adults compared to those receiving "usual care." (Schore et al. 2011; Zurovac et al. 2014; Brown et al. 2012; Coburn et al. 2012.)
​
Full article here: https://www.cmsatoday-digital.com

Doylestown, PA - Health Quality Partners today announced that Eric Heil has been named senior vice president of Global Growth and Opportunity. Founded in 2001, Health Quality Partners (HQP) is a leading not-for-profit healthcare service provider and quality improvement research and development organization. HQP has created a highly effective and innovative care model called Advanced Preventive Care for chronically ill, older adults. Advanced Preventive Care represents a combination of care coordination, disease management, and personalized preventive interventions. Created using 6 design principles which are implemented through 5 operational domains, Advanced Preventive Care uses specially trained nurses to deliver robust, reliable, and long-term preventive care interventions in close collaboration with primary care providers.

See Full Press Release Here

By Ken Coburn, MD, DrPH, FACP, CEO and Medical Director at HQP

​Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Reflection on recent tragic aviation events offers us an important insight;
though immediate and practical gains in system performance and capabilities can often be achieved through incremental improvements (the crudest iteration of which is the “bolt on” solution) – this is not always so. 
 
There are conditions under which complete redesign is required.  Failure to heed indications of that being the case, can lead to tragic outcomes … far worse than forgoing an incremental improvement incompatible with the system within which it operates.
 
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-fi-boeing-max-design-20190315-story.html
 
We are most certainly surrounded by equivalent situations in health care delivery every day.  Do we see them?  Do we know when not to force incremental improvements, but rather to champion fundamental redesign?  Do we even know when the equivalent of the plane crashing occurs on a community population health basis?
 
The investigation into the root cause of these aviation disasters is still unfolding and more facts and insights will likely enter the public domain in the weeks and months ahead.  But the story garnered so far … has a profound ring of truth to it.  Let’s use it as an insight to inform our design thinking and energize us to take the appropriate actions required to improve our health care system.