Cooperative advocate for quality care

IT TAKES A TEAM: Healthcentric Advisors reviews health providers' quality metrics with an eye to improvement, a task it now will take on for all of New England. Among the nonprofit's staff are, from left, Blake Morphis, manager, analytic services, Kathy Calandra, senior program administrator, Melissa Miranda, Rhode Island program director, and Tammy Quattrocchi, contracts coordinator and compliance officer. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
IT TAKES A TEAM: Healthcentric Advisors reviews health providers' quality metrics with an eye to improvement, a task it now will take on for all of New England. Among the nonprofit's staff are, from left, Blake Morphis, manager, analytic services, Kathy Calandra, senior program administrator, Melissa Miranda, Rhode Island program director, and Tammy Quattrocchi, contracts coordinator and compliance officer. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Our health care system is composed of millions of parts, persons and functions, all of which need help to function cooperatively and effectively.

That is the role of Healthcentric Advisors, a Providence-based nonprofit that’s been toiling since 1995 – with an ever-expanding reach – to improve health care in the state by teaching expertise and promoting interaction.

Since its founding, Healthcentric Advisors has held the federal contract as the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for the Ocean State. It provides technical support, consulting, research and project management-services to the large number of health care providers and related services in Rhode Island.

The entity is a neutral expert that pulls together sometimes-competing parties to air problems and share solutions.

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“We serve as a neutral convener and provider of quality-improvement technical assistance,” said H. John Keimig, CEO, president and executive director. Healthcentric Advisors has, for instance, gone into nursing homes to offer help with persistent problems like pressure sores, and helped hospitals grapple with problems of hospital-acquired infections.

Healthcentric Advisors’ expertise was profoundly recognized in July 2014, when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gave the organization one of only 14 contracts granted nationwide to function as a regional Quality Improvement Organization. Under the five-year contract, Healthcentric Advisors is QIO for all six New England states. Before the federal government’s 2014 move to regionalize these contracts, each state had its own QIO.

The competitive, $53.4 million contract cemented Healthcentric Advisors’ reputation as a national leader and more than doubled its annual revenue, from $6 million in 2013 to $13 million in 2015. The contract also increased the organization’s staff by 26 to 60 employees. Two new offices were opened, in Woburn, Mass., and Brunswick, Maine.

Keimig said Healthcentric Advisors is the first QIO contractor in the nation to help create a statewide health care quality report card. Also, Keimig said the organization is the first QIO contractor in the nation to develop best practices for reducing avoidable hospital readmissions.

If organizations like Healthcentric Advisors did not exist, “we would not see as much focus on quality improvement in health care as we see now,” said Kara Butler, director of administrative services. “Other organizations will look to us when they want to work toward consensus.”

For instance, a commonly recognized problem is the tendency of the health care system to drop the ball on passing information forward as a patient moves from one facility to another. This can lead to mistakes and unnecessary readmissions.

In the fall of 2011, Healthcentric Advisors joined an existing group of about 15 health care providers in southern Rhode Island called the Washington County Transitions Coalition. The coalition’s objective is to improve transitions of care for patients, mainly by getting hospitals, doctors, nursing facilities and pharmacies to communicate with each other.

Healthcentric Advisors immediately helped the group begin measuring the effects of its work. It determined that 30-day readmissions to health care facilities per 1,000 Medicare beneficiaries had declined a laudable 32.3 percent from the start of 2010 to the end of 2012.

“We are not just looking at how to improve health care for providers, but we also are looking at how to improve it for patients,” Butler said. “If the patient does not get the health care he needs, the system fails.” •

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