United Physicians Expands Rollout of Wellcentive Solutions to Drive Success in Incentive-Based Quality Programs

ATLANTA, Oct. 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- United Physicians, Inc., one of the largest independent physician organizations in Michigan, today announced the expansion of its partnership with Wellcentive to empower its physicians to successfully participate in quality programs and risk-based contracts. Under the new agreement, United Physicians will roll out Wellcentive's suite of solutions and services across its full population of patients. The organization will also add Wellcentive's solution for risk management to its existing Wellcentive platform and enlist the company's services for managing data quality.

United Physicians is expanding its rollout of Wellcentive's population health management solution as the linchpin in its long-term strategic plan for managing risk across the care continuum. The IPO currently participates in several incentive programs with contracted health plans, including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan's Physician Group Incentive Program (PGIP). To unify its quality improvement activities, the organization has identified 65 quality measures on which to focus. Wellcentive's solution will enable individual physicians to improve their performance on these measures, and allow the overall organization to track and manage quality programs.

"One of our priorities as an organization is to prepare our member practices for the future and help position them to take advantage of performance programs," said John Vismara, United Physicians' senior vice president of Information Services. "This is more critical now than ever, because we expect that a significant percentage of our population will be covered under risk-based contracts in the next two years. For our organization to thrive and prosper, we have to prepare our practices for that today. Wellcentive is the solution that will enable us to succeed in programs with both upside and downside risk."

"With the pressure of the industry's transformation from fee-for-service to value-based care, success will depend on clinicians and care managers having access to actionable information, analytics and workflow tools across the continuum of care," said Tom Zajac, Wellcentive's CEO. "United Physicians is implementing the critical steps needed for practices to excel. We are honored to expand our partnership with them and deliver a comprehensive solution to prioritize and deliver the best-possible clinical, financial, and patient experience outcomes."

Wellcentive's platform enables healthcare organizations to aggregate data from all modalities of care, standardize best practices for managing care and continuously improve outcomes. Wellcentive's risk management solution, which United Physicians will now incorporate into its Wellcentive solution suite, delivers the insight that providers need to focus resources on patients who require the most care. The solution enables providers to identify high-risk patients, proactively manage their care through focused care interventions, and aggressively forecast and manage outcomes and costs for populations.

The new agreement is an expansion and extension of the relationship between United Physicians and Wellcentive, which started in 2008, and it now also includes Wellcentive's services for monitoring and improving data quality.

"If we want physicians to make using data a part of their daily practice, we have to deliver information that they can trust," said Vismara. "It sounds easy, but the mix of claims, EMR and other clinical and administrative data across a wide variety of entities, housed in many disparate systems, is very complex, including a wide range of standards and processes for coding and documenting care. Wellcentive's services will help us monitor our data for quality issues, identify appropriate solutions, and ensure that information is consistent, accurate and actionable for our physicians."

About United Physicians
United Physicians, Inc. is one of the largest independent physician organizations in Michigan. Founded in 2000, United Physicians represents more than 2,200 physicians with medical staff privileges at hospitals throughout Southeast Michigan. Its mission is to deliver a healthcare system of excellence to our community through a coordinated, efficient and integrated network of physicians. For more information, call 248-593-0100 or visit www.updoctors.com.

About Wellcentive
Built from the ground up to help customers improve clinical, financial and human outcomes, Wellcentive's population health management technology is cloud-based, scalable, and customized to meet the needs of providers, health organizations and payers. Wellcentive's technology, insight and services help care teams measure and report performance and implement actionable workflow to drive value-based reimbursement and the transition from volume to value. Wellcentive has gained recognition as a leader in population health management in reports recently released by IDC Health, KLAS and Chilmark. Wellcentive aggregates data from more than 3,000 interfaces, and its solutions improve outcomes for over 30 million lives. Visit www.wellcentive.com; follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook; or call 877-213-8456 to learn more.

For more information:
Kristi Johnson
Wellcentive
678.710.2008
[email protected]

SOURCE Wellcentive