April 20, 2024: What is a High Value Visit?

Moving from Fee for Service to Prospective Payment in Primary Care: Advanced Primary Care: The Future of Primary Care – Part 8

Sponsored by              WWW.THEMDCEO.COM

The high value visit concept is one that we’ve seen work really well in a direct primary care model where the longer appointments allow the physician and the patient to have more time to build an understanding of each other and how the physician wants to care for that patient. We started implementing this process in the DPC clinic model that we (Mike) had in Seattle when he first opened a clinic there back in 2009.

We’re doing the same work with our current pilot at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, NY. We lengthen some visits to 40 minutes so we can engage the high-risk people and fill those slots with high-risk patients. This creates more time to actually understand what the needs are from the patient’s perspective looking at their total risk and what their risk factors are. They use that time to build trust. The longer time frame has shown to have a huge impact on total cost of care and compliance with the care plans that the patient and the clinician wants to develop for the patient.

The High Value Visit is a really important step in transforming into the Advanced Primary Care model. Give the clinicians more time with the patients that really need to establish the trust relationship and develop a plan for care for them with the right team support around them (like Care Navigators) who can help the patient follow through on that plan and actually accomplish the goals.

That leads to the next thing too because with the information that identifies in real time the areas of challenge that we have through the Whole Risk Score™ and the care plan development that was created during the high value visit. This helps each staff member to play a more focused and significant role in caring for those individuals and it flows in a way that has team members able to live out their life’s mission as a health care clinician.

Scott Conard, MD              Michael Tuggy, MD                  Susan Lindstrom                 Laurence Bauer, MSW, MEd

scott@scottconard.com   MTuggy@converginghealth.com   slindstrom@mypha.com   Laurence.bauer@gmail.com