Synergy - January/February 2015 - 17

industry feature

1

Population Health
Clinical Workforce
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Physicians
Nurses (APNs, NPs)
Physician assistants
Pharmacists
Case managers
Care coordinators
Behavioral health specialists
Social workers
Community health worker
Medical assistants
Lay care givers

exist today. It will require managing the
health of individuals across the entire
continuum of care. The fragmentation of
acute and post-acute care services that
we see today will need to be replaced by
a seamless population health network of
providers who have skills used to keep
people healthy and out of the hospital.
When people do become sick, their care
will be coordinated and provided by the
most effective but least costly provider in
the most appropriate facility. The hospital
medical staff of today will likely evolve
into a population health clinical network
of providers from different training and
education backgrounds mostly working
outside the hospital (sidebar 1). The role of
primary care physicians in medical home
delivery models will likely change with
expanded responsibilities in the value-based
population health environment (sidebar 2).
The push to expand patient access points
to population health care delivery will lead
to telemedicine on steroids-virtual care
(sidebar 3).

2

Many members of the clinical workforce,
in addition to physicians, will provide
healthcare, advice, and education virtually
in the electronic workplace of the future.
MSPs should continue to develop new and
innovative credentialing and privileging
solutions to support expansion of their
patient safety gatekeeper role to include
the many more professional categories,
responsibilities, and delivery models that will
arise to meet the demands of population
health management.

Population Health
Clinical Workforce
Collaboration, cooperation, and teamwork
will be the hallmark of a successful
population health clinical workforce in
the future. Would you be able to use
those words today to describe the working
relationship between your medical, nursing,
and other professional staff? The MSP
could serve a valuable role even today by
establishing a robust onboarding process for
new medical staff members that includes
collaborative teamwork training. In the
future, an onboarding program that brings
all clinical workforce members together to
learn how to effectively function as a team
will be a prerequisite for success.
Being paid based on performance for both
healthcare systems and practitioners will
grow as part of healthcare reform. Fee for
service will fade away and be replaced by
value-based reimbursement. Practitioners
and healthcare systems alike will be paid
based on how healthy they keep their
patient population, not by how much "stuff"
they do to them.
Profits will depend on providing care at
the lowest possible cost. This will lead to
the development of robust performance
measurement and accountability systems for
the clinical workforce. MSPs today should

Community Primary Care Physician
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PCP specialists: manage patients with particular specialty conditions
PCP complex care manager: manage high-risk, high-cost patients
PCP medical home team director: oversee care provided by RNs, APNs
PCP concierge provider: manage broad range of conditions for small panel of patients

be working closely with their quality and IT
departments to access meaningful specialty
specific performance metrics for OPPE
and FPPE. OPPE and FPPE as performance
measurement systems should logically
expand to meet the needs of the population
health management system of the future.
All clinical workforce members should be
able to access their individual performance
on a daily basis and modify their practice
to improve performance as needed to
meet targets. And in fact if they do not
meet targeted performance over time, they
will likely be removed from the provider
network. Job descriptions with explicit
performance expectation requirements will
be necessary for the entire clinical workforce
of the future - another great opportunity to
expand the gatekeeper role for MSPs.

3

Virtual Care
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Live video-based visits
Message-based visits
Lab and radiology results
Prescriptions
Education

The traditional medical staff structure is
already struggling to remain relevant and will
surely suffer a welcome demise in the new
world of population health management.
MSPs today should be working with their
medical staff and administrative leaders
to restructure membership categories and
requirements, departments, divisions,
committees, and meetings to achieve a
meaningful existence within their respective
healthcare system. A meaningful existence
means working with management to
achieve organizational strategic goals and
objectives while maintaining compliance
with regulatory and accreditation standards.
In the future, if not already, those strategic
goals will include population health
management across the continuum of care.
Many more people than acute care facility
medical staff need to be in the room for
that one.
The development of an appropriate clinical
workforce designed for population health
JANUARY/FEBR UARY 2015 SYNERGY

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Synergy - January/February 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Synergy - January/February 2015
