Aledade and UnitedHealthcare Working Together to Improve Quality and Keep People Healthy

November 25, 2020

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Aledade and UnitedHealthcare are working together in a new accountable care program to improve the quality of health care in Arkansas and enhance care coordination by promoting a team approach to patient care.

This partnership represents Aledade’s first accountable care program for Medicare Advantage plan participants. More than 15,000 people enrolled in UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare health plans are eligible to benefit from this collaboration.

The new relationship comes at a time when clinical advances and new technologies are redefining how care providers and health plans work together to support patients who are becoming more engaged in managing their health and well-being. Through the accountable care program, Aledade will provide patient care under an innovative, value-based model focused on keeping people healthy through the delivery of quality, coordinated health care.

“Aledade is proud to form a strong partnership with UnitedHealthcare to bring high-quality, value-based care to people enrolled in its Medicare Advantage plans,” said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, CEO and co-founder of Aledade. “With this partnership, our Arkansas accountable care program now offers the benefits of Aledade’s model of care whether patients are covered by Medicaid, traditional Medicare or Medicare Advantage.”

“UnitedHealthcare and Aledade are mutually committed to improving the quality and cost of health care,” said Gregg Kunemund, CEO of UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement in Arkansas. “By working more collaboratively with local care providers and creating a more connected health care experience, we can help improve patient care and enhance people’s ability to live healthier lives.”

Many patients – particularly those with complex or chronic illnesses – find they sometimes have to connect information from each of their doctor’s visits themselves, and may receive duplicative tests or health care that isn’t coordinated. UnitedHealthcare shares data to help map the many steps in a patient’s health care treatment, from the clinic or pharmacy, to a hospital admission or ER visit.

Through this accountable care relationship, Aledade and UnitedHealthcare use this data together to better coordinate patients’ health care. Using technology that enables management across a physician’s entire patient population, the two organizations are able to identify clear, actionable data specific to individual patients’ health needs and potential missed care opportunities – such as an annual cervical or a colorectal cancer screening.

“By partnering with high-performing clinics in Arkansas, Aledade has brought to the table an extremely sophisticated and high-tech skillset to help our physicians treat Medicare patients in ways never before possible,” said Dr. Matthew Callaway of SAMA Healthcare Services, an El Dorado-based primary care practice that partners with Aledade in an accountable care organization. “This new partnership will enable us to use that same technology for UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare plan participants. Together, we are making great strides in our mission to continually improve health care throughout Arkansas.”

This collaboration also improves the ability to identify patients at high risk and help them reduce emergency room visits and readmissions to the hospital, manage their chronic health conditions and take their needed medications.

UnitedHealthcare serves more than 330,000 Arkansans, including 46,000 Medicare plan participants, with a network of nearly 90 hospitals and 8,000 physicians and other care providers statewide.

More than 15 million people enrolled in UnitedHealthcare plans across the country have access to accountable care programs, delivered in part through more than 800 accountable care arrangements nationwide as the organization engages in deeper, more collaborative relationships with physicians and hospitals.

Care providers nationwide are showing strong interest in a shift to value-based care. UnitedHealthcare’s total payments to physicians and hospitals that are tied to value-based arrangements have tripled in the last three years to more than $54 billion. By the end of 2018, UnitedHealthcare expects that figure to reach $65 billion.

For more information about UnitedHealthcare’s changing relationships with care providers and how value-based programs are helping to improve quality and people’s health, visit www.UHC.com/valuebasedcare and download the Value-based Care Report.

 

About Aledade

Founded in 2014, Aledade offers a new model of primary care that puts physicians back where they should be: quarterbacking their patients’ health care. Aledade partners with primary care physicians to build and lead Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) that allow these doctors to stay independent, practice medicine like they’ve always wanted to, and thrive financially by keeping people healthy. Aledade provides data analytics and user-friendly technology to help doctors provide more seamless care, unparalleled regulatory expertise, best practices developed with and shared by a national network of physicians, and face-to-face practice transformation support. Since its founding in 2014, Aledade has established successful ACOs in Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia, which care for more than 240,000 patients.

At the heart of the Aledade model is the simple, but radical, idea that Aledade only succeeds when partner practices succeed in delivering better care at a lower cost. For more information, visit aledade.com.

 

About UnitedHealthcare

UnitedHealthcare is dedicated to helping people nationwide live healthier lives by simplifying the health care experience, meeting consumer health and wellness needs, and sustaining trusted relationships with care providers. The company offers the full spectrum of health benefit programs for individuals, employers, military service members, retirees and their families, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and contracts directly with more than 1 million physicians and care professionals, and 6,000 hospitals and other care facilities nationwide. UnitedHealthcare is one of the businesses of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), a diversified Fortune 50 health and well-being company. For more information, visit UnitedHealthcare at www.uhc.com or follow @myUHC on Twitter.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 19, 2017

For more information on Aledade, contact:

Nicholas Samonas, 603-988-6671

[email protected]

For more information on UnitedHealthcare, contact:

Megan Sergel, 952-931-5380

[email protected]

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