As Cooperstown, N.Y.-based Bassett Healthcare transitions to an integrated delivery system, it turned to Optum as a partner to preserve its culture and independence.
During an Optum-sponsored Becker's CEO + CFO Virtual Forum session, Mike Valli, executive vice president of Optum, interviewed Tommy Ibrahim, MD, president and CEO of Bassett, about the organization's challenges and strategies.
Five key takeaways:
1. Founded more than a century ago, Bassett has deep roots in the central New York communities it serves. Bassett operates five hospitals, two nursing homes and a medical group with more than 700 practitioners across a service area of 5,600 square miles. "This organization has really prided itself on serving this community," Dr. Ibrahim said. "We are unique in that we are very widespread, very rural and serve a largely aging population."
2. Bassett focused on creating an integrated healthcare delivery system to improve patient care and delivering more care locally. "We needed to migrate from a holding company structure to an integrated operating model, with a system backbone and a drive toward integration and systemness," Dr. Ibrahim said. Bassett wanted to create interventions that would support its aging demographic and enhance its quality and service levels. "Our flagship hospital is in Cooperstown, and that's where we offer advanced clinical services," he continued. "We want to unwind that and instead bring care locally to the community. We plan to add primary and specialty care as well as extend virtual capabilities into those communities."
3. Quality analytics are central to population health initiatives and understanding total cost of care. "We need appropriate analytics and insights to be able to create targeted interventions to support population health capabilities," Dr. Ibrahim said. "Analytical capabilities will help us to understand total cost of care, and we intend to play in the value-based care space. Building the capabilities and infrastructure early on will be important to advance population health-based initiatives."
4. Financial and recruiting challenges encouraged Bassett to find core competencies outside its organization. As Bassett began pursuing these goals, it became apparent the organization needed to find an outside partner for some administrative functions. "We had to get areas like analytics, revenue cycle management and information technology right and had struggled for years to be able to do that," Dr. Ibrahim said. "Optum was a single solution from an organization with depth, experience and a good reputation in each of these capabilities."
5. Engaging the board, functional leaders and employees is key to a successful transition. One of the largest concerns for the Bassett team was how the Optum partnership would impact the culture. "Once our board and employees understood that this was not some sort of a takeover [by Optum], it was actually a mechanism for Bassett to sustain its independence as a healthcare system and propel us forward to achieve our mission, we landed in a very good place with 95 percent of our leaders and people transitioning over [to Optum]," Dr. Ibrahim said. Initially, Bassett is revamping patient access initiatives and enhancing revenue cycle workstreams. Plans include investing in analytics to support quality-based initiatives and administrative functions as well as cybersecurity systems.
While the financial benefits matter, they were not Bassett's primary motivation. "The financial benefits are significant, but the driving factor wasn't the finances," Dr. Ibrahim said. "It was the preservation of our mission and our independence."