Last weekend, I was able to attend the annual Physical Medicine Guild* Summit for our team of over 60+ physical therapist, chiropractors, and acupuncturist. This amazing group of people come together once per year to share best practices, care insights, and to invite a national renowned speaker to participate in a weekend continuing medical course. This weekend was dedicated to “Movement is Medicine” and we were fortunate to have Chris Bice, PT, DPT of the University of Pittsburgh headline our event. Chris is a leader in the Primary Spine Practitioner movement and was awesome to have him with us. The event is always fabulously produced by Dan Lord, DC who serves as our Sr. Program Manager for Physical Medicine at Crossover Health.
WE SEE HOW HEALTHCARE SHOULD BE
Within our connected system of health, Crossover Health has designed a complete approach to wellbeing with a comprehensive care team that is incentivized to reach specific health outcomes goals, not process metrics requested by insurance companies. We have certainly seen this with our physical medicine program which is consistently in the top 4% for outcomes achieved (actual / predicted) as part of the national Focus On Therapeutic Outcomes (FOTO) network. This is an incredible feat achieved due to our integrated care model, the time our providers have to work with patients, and the diligent efforts of our physical medicine team to implement specific care pathways across the entire guild.
Their efforts were recently highlighted in the May 10, 2019 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. “Integrated Physical Medicine at Employer-Sponsored Health Clinics Improves Quality of Care at Reduced Cost” describes the direct impact on health care value that an awesome physical medicine program can have for employers. Musculoskeletal expenditures are always in the top three health expenses for employers not to mention the cost in time and productivity to complete 10-14 treatments or worse yet be referred to the surgeons for conditions that could have been effectively treated in the outpatient setting.
The study evaluated outcomes associated with integrating physical medicine in employer-sponsored health centers. The authors compared healthcare claims and clinical outcomes data of Crossover Health patients with musculoskeletal complaints to the national FOTO database of outpatient physical medicine outcomes. The following clinical outcomes for Crossover patients were included in the findings, as well as an economic outcome of up to $630 saved per patient.
ONE SIMPLE PLACE TO GO FOR TRUSTED CARE
Perhaps, what is most beautiful about these findings, is that this is just one of the discipline Crossover offers. In fact, every single of the functions that makes up our integrated care model effectively performs in the same way – behavioral health, health coaching, primary care, and our specialist who also become a part of our model. In addition to these care offerings, historically offered in person, we are now extended our services to be online and anytime, to include proactive health management and care gap closure, referral coordination to high value specialist, and finally to integrate digital health directly into the care flows of our clinicians to extend their reach and impact for our members.
This is what fullstack healthcare was intended to be – and this is the type of outcomes you should expect. Healthcare that just IS and as it should be!
* A “Guild” is a group of clinicians in the same discipline who organize themselves to improve their craft, share best practices, agree to standards, and hold each other accountable for outcomes. We currently have 8 different guilds within Crossover Health who each organize around the development of a common standard of care, best practices, and shared values in the treatment of our patients.
Scott Shreeve, MD 