Northwest Community Healthcare Joins Illinois Health Partners Medicare ACO
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (February 16, 2015) - Northwest Community Healthcare (NCH) has joined the Illinois Health Partners (IHP) Medicare Shared Savings Program Accountable Care Organization (ACO).
The Medicare ACO program is sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and is designed to provide high-quality, coordinated care. Through the program, NCH works with IHP and CMS to provide Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries with high-quality service and care, while reducing the growth in Medicare expenses through enhanced care coordination.
"The Shared Savings ACO program focuses on coordinating care for Medicare patients," says Susan Nelson, M.D., Vice President of Physician Operations at NCH Medical Group. "Physicians can use clinical data and best practices to help drive medical decision-making, which improves the quality of care for these patients. Our goal is to deliver innovative, exceptional and coordinated care while creating value for the communities and populations we serve."
More than 100 NCH Medical Group physicians are participating in the ACO, which covers nearly 12,000 lives. NCH's Medicare Shared Savings ACO is the second alliance designed to deliver improved, sustainable patient care while better managing healthcare costs. In July, NCH partnered with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois to create an ACO that helps increase quality, efficiency and access for nearly 20,000 patients.
IHP is a regional provider network designed to improve healthcare quality and efficiency. IHP has nearly 1,800 affiliated primary and specialty care physicians and serves more than 110,000 HMO patients in the west, southwest and northwest suburbs of Chicago.
An ACO is a network of doctors and hospitals that shares responsibility for providing coordinated care to patients. ACOs make providers jointly accountable for the health of their patients, giving them both quality and efficiency incentives to manage the full continuum of their population's healthcare needs.
About Northwest Community Healthcare (NCH)
Serving Chicago's northwest suburbs since 1959, NCH is a comprehensive, patient-centered system of care that serves more than 350,000 outpatients each year and more than 20,000 inpatients treated annually at the 496-bed acute care hospital in Arlington Heights. The award-winning hospital holds the prestigious Magnet designation for nursing excellence, is designated as a Primary Stroke Center, earned the Joint Commission's Gold Seal of Approval in 2011, and was awarded the Leapfrog Group's designation as one of the nation's Top Hospitals based on quality and safety criteria. NCH has four Immediate Care locations in the northwest suburbs and operates an Easy Access Clinic in Palatine. NCH has a medical staff of more than 1,000 physicians, which includes the board-certified primary care doctors and specialists of the NCH Medical Group. For more information or to find a doctor on the NCH Medical staff, visit www.nch.org.