Tucson Healthcare Group Growing New Sustainable Health Community to Help All Be Well

Do you ever despair of the health system working to get sick patients better, costs down and doing everything it is supposed to do to keep us all alive and well?

If you live in Tucson, you are in luck. According to a story posted on businesswire.com, healthcare providers are coming together to make the city one of the healthiest in the nation.

Tucson Medical Center, local physicians and health technology and services company Optum today announced they are creating the nation’s first “Sustainable Health Community,” based on an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model in which hospitals, physicians, residents, employers and others share in the risk and rewards of making the health system work better, and ultimately, improve the health of the whole community.

Although experts don’t agree yet on what makes a health community “sustainable”, they do agree that such communities are critical to the nation’s health, according to the Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Hygiene and Public Health, The Johns Hopkins University.

In the Tucson community, healthcare providers will coordinate care and work together to safely and securely share information and come up with measurements of the quality of the care being performed in the network, while sharing and reducing costs, as reported in the story on businesswire.com.

“This is a new level of collaboration among hospitals and physicians that is all focused on improving both the quality of care we provide to individuals and the overall health of our community,” said Judy Rich, president and CEO of Tucson Medical Center, in the businesswire.com story. “We believe that Optum’s capabilities help make this collaboration possible and solve some of our biggest challenges – ranging from analytics that help measure the quality of outcomes for patients, to secure networks that enable primary care physicians and specialists to share important information about their patients’ care, to consulting expertise that will help us build and manage our new business model successfully.”

Not everyone is enchanted with the idea of sustainable communities or the ACO model, however. According to the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), these types of organizations are nothing more than HMOs.

As the organization, which believes in a single-payer universal healthcare program, explains on its website, the ACO concept has primarily been promoted as a cost-saving plan. But like the HMO, these physicians claim, it’s vague and depending on the person, has multiple definitions of what exactly it is. PNHP says on its website that the main way these kinds of programs are accountable is by shifting some or all of the insurance risk now borne by private insurance and public programs like Medicare to providers.

But Tucson feels it’s on to a good thing. “With new capabilities that enable us to measure how our actions are making a difference in the lives of the members of our community, we will be able to establish benchmarks based on national standards, and provide data that demonstrate better quality of care, greater efficiency and, eventually, improved health for the Tucson community overall,” said John Friend, vice president of business affairs and associate general counsel for Tucson Medical Center and CEO of SAACO at businesswire.com.

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