When HealthCare Partners Nevada President Mark Price shared the four fundamental aspirations his organization pursues at a recent meeting with Intermountain Healthcare leaders, it was remarkable how well they align with Intermountain's fundamentals. They illustrate why Intermountain Healthcare's leaders chose to purchase the Nevada-based organization in June of this year.

The HealthCare Partners Nevada fundamentals are:

• Quality
• Affordability
• Patient Experience
• Team

Mark said, "When we went through the process of being sold, we met with a lot of organizations — we went on a lot of first dates and kissed a lot of frogs — and from our first meeting with Intermountain, we were incredibly impressed by the overlap between what we care about and what Intermountain does. The words are a little different between the HealthCare Partners Nevada fundamentals and the Intermountain fundamentals, but there's incredible overlap in both the intent and the actions."

HealthCare Partners Nevada has the second largest medical group in Nevada, with 320 employed providers — including primary care, specialty care, inpatient, post-acute, and house-call physicians. They have 55 care sites and cover all of southern Nevada, including rural and low-income areas. They serve almost 400,000 patients and assume full risk for the health of most of them. That includes operating the largest Medicare Advantage Network in Nevada.

"We're all in on population health," Mark said. "Over 90 percent of our revenue is in contracts, where we're paid a fixed amount per month to take care of all the healthcare costs of a population of people. So primary care, specialty care, hospital care — we cover it all."
Ama Brobbey, MD, HealthCare Partners Nevada's chief medical officer, told meeting participants her team cares for many patients with complex medical needs and multiple chronic conditions. They've developed unique ways to help these complicated patients navigate the healthcare system and receive excellent coordinated care.

Here are some components of HealthCare Partners Nevada's unique model that Dr. Brobbey shared:

• The primary care physician is at the center and coordinates all the care throughout each patient's journey.
• They have 28 myGeneration Senior Clinics that focus on helping seniors stay healthy and avoid hospitalizations. The clinics have 30 percent fewer hospital admissions for patients than the national average and 94 percent physician retention. "The staff loves it," Dr. Brobbey said. The myGeneration Senior Clinics are very similar to Intermountain's Reimaged Primary Care clinics.
• HealthCare Partners Nevada doesn't own any hospitals, so they've developed a unique way to provide continuity of care when their patients are admitted to a hospital: They employ hospitalists and nurse case managers who work in all the various hospitals in southern Nevada. The hospitalists ensure HealthCare Partners Nevada patients receive the best care while they're in the hospital and the case managers make sure the patients are well-integrated back into the community and get all the services they'll need at home — including home health services, the supplies they need at home, and follow-up care with physicians.
• They have contracts with physician specialists and offer financial incentives to encourage their specialist partners to provide timely appointments, send notes back to primary care physicians quickly, and keep costs down by doing things like avoiding unnecessary visits and tests.
• HealthCare Partners Nevada has a home monitoring service called Project Trident for patients with complex needs. It includes a scale, a pulse oximeter machine, a blood pressure machine, and a blood glucose monitoring tool — all linked to an iPad. The system alerts the HealthCare Partners Nevada team any time a patient is out of range so caregivers can quickly respond. "We'll immediately jump on that alert, whether it's sending someone to their house or getting them into the clinic the same day, or whatever they need," Dr. Brobbey said.

In a video Dr. Brobbey shared about Project Trident, patient Essie Snider said, "I feel more connected to my doctor because she knows what's going on and I don't have to go through so much explaining. I love having control of my health — knowing what I can do to help it and what I can do to stop things before they get started."

Mark said, "We're thrilled to be part of the Intermountain family. It's been everything we hoped it would be and more. We've been blown away, certainly by your outcomes and what you've achieved, but even more so by the people. We're thrilled to be on this journey with you. Our organization is excited. We think it's the right thing for us and we're confident Intermountain's entry into southern Nevada will be a game-changer for our community."

"We're so honored to have these incredible clinicians and caregivers now be a part of Intermountain," says Rob Allen, Intermountain senior vice president and chief operating officer. "This gives us the opportunity to strengthen and extend our mission — improving health outcomes and affordability through all of the work we'll do together, and ultimately benefiting all our communities as we learn together and build our strengths."