Paul Krakovitz, MD, became CEO of Greensboro, N.C.-based Cone Health on March 16, roughly 15 months after the five-hospital system joined Risant Health, the nonprofit created by Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente. Dr. Krakovitz previously held leadership roles at Cressey & Company, Intermountain Health and Cleveland Clinic.
Now, Risant is involved in Cone Health’s value-based care work, bringing tools developed through Kaiser Permanente’s experience with the model to the community health system. Risant is also helping fund Cone Health’s $40 million effort to rebuild its Epic platform after years of technical debt limited the system’s ability to adopt newer capabilities.
Dr. Krakovitz discussed with Becker’s the system’s work with Risant, its Epic investment and Cone Health’s efforts to move away from volume and toward more proactive care.
He said Risant has brought additional resources and focus to Cone Health’s value-based care strategy while the health system remains focused on its local community.
“The value-based care tools that Risant brings from a national scale is just something that is incredibly unusual to be able to deploy in a community health system, and it’s a huge benefit, both for our clinicians and for our community,” Dr. Krakovitz said.
Cone Health and Kaiser Permanente have both used Epic for years, Dr. Krakovitz said. But like many community health systems, Cone Health has had to make difficult decisions about where to invest, and he sees the Epic modernization as an opportunity to give clinicians more advanced tools for value-based care.
That work is part of a broader shift at Cone Health toward delivering high-quality care at a lower cost, with an emphasis on equity and evidence-based medicine. Dr. Krakovitz said moving further toward that model requires changing the way health systems have traditionally operated.
“It’s a mind shift that we’re trying to move away from volume and more to getting proactive or upstream care, and having these tools allows us to do this,” he said.
Two of those tools have been particularly helpful at Cone Health, according to Dr. Krakovitz. Value-based guidelines give clinicians standardized, evidence-based guidance through the EHR and can reduce the number of specialist consultations. The second, Care Without Delay, is designed to make care more efficient from the time a patient enters the emergency department through discharge.
Reducing the amount of time patients spend in the hospital can improve their experience while also lowering the cost of care, Dr. Krakovitz said.
He said Cone Health’s goal is to become “the model community health system in value-based care,” with a focus on clinical excellence, the community and reducing costs.
“We want to be able to help lead the country to show that this is not only possible, but it’s the best thing for our patients and our communities,” he said. “To do that, you have to recognize three things. One is excellence. Second is that the community is what’s most important. And third is bending the cost curve.”
The importance of community is something Dr. Krakovitz said he learned early in his career. During his residency at the University of Vermont in Burlington, he recalled wheeling a patient into a recovery unit and watching the patient wave to people around the room who were neighbors and family members.
“It was just this quick imprinting for me that healthcare is local, and that it’s so important for us to never forget how important the community is to healthcare, and vice versa,” he said.
