Stanford University has tested its version of care coordination among its own employees, identifying high-cost patients in the school’s insurance plan who were dissatisfied with their primary care, building a team around their needs to reduce referrals and keeping these complex patients away from the emergency department.

Washington Monthly profiled the experiment started by Arnold Milstein, MD, director of the Stanford Clinical Excellence Research Center, along with Ann Lindsay, MD, and Alan Glaseroff, MD, the wife-and-husband team in charge of Stanford Coordinated Care.

Lindsay and Glaseroff each worked part-time among a scaled-down staff with a registered nurse, physical therapist, social worker, pharmacist and four medical assistants who would be trained to act as “care coordinators.” Providing care to more than 250 patients at a monthly cost of $286 per patient from the Stanford Health Care plan, they were able to lower the costs of care by more than 13 percent in the first six months, a result they say wouldn’t have been possible without a value-based approach to care.

“We handled them in a way that under fee-for-service would have been financial suicide,” Glaseroff said.

Read the full article below: