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Featured topics and speakers
Featured topics and speakers
What are the benefits of home healthcare? What is the demand for home hygiene? What does home health care include? What are the biggest problems faced with hospitals?
Our guests are Isaac J. Myers II, MD, Chief Hygiene Integrated Officer at Baptist Health and President of Baptist Health Medical Group. Host Todd Unger, AMA Chief Experience Officer.
speaker
Isaac J. Myers II, MD, Baptist Health, Chief Health Integrated Director. Baptist Health Medical Group President
Dr. Myers: When you think about home care and vision from a Baptist health perspective, it's really about being able to meet the needs of the patients and provide the right care at the right time and in the right place.
Unger: Hello, welcome to the AMA update videos and podcasts. Today we are talking about Baptist Health's huge investment in home health services and its impact so far. Today's guest is Dr. Isaac Myers, Chief Hygiene Integration Officer at Baptist Health and president of Baptist Health Medical Group in Louisville, Kentucky. I'm Todd Unger, Chicago AMA Chief Experience Officer. Dr. Myers, it's great to be with us today.
Dr. Myers: It's great to be here, Todd. I'm really excited to be here today.
UNGER: Well, I had the opportunity to meet you at the AMA's annual meeting last week. It's great to follow up with you here on camera and learn what you're doing with Baptist Health. Before I get started, I thought Chief Experience Officer was an interesting title, but you also have an interesting title, Chief Health Integration Director. What exactly does that mean?
Dr. Myers: Well, I think I was given that title. Because when I first came to the Baptist and joined, it was the president of a medical group, so I just managed the position enterprise. And within the first year, my background gave me the opportunity to manage our health plans and value-based care side, such as business and case management.
And we decided what would be the best title. It must be more than a chief medical officer. So we came up with the idea of Chief Health Integration Director as the title.
Unger: That makes a lot of sense. And you have a rather broad perspective on how things are going. And that's probably very important about the topic we're trying to discuss.
Dr. Myers: Ah, absolutely.
UNGER: Please tell me a little. Please tell me a little more about how you define home hygiene and what Baptist health means.
Dr. Myers: Yes, I've been in home care for years before coming to Baptist Health. In fact, my wife has been a home health care manager for over 22 years. So my professional background, a lot of work involvement in home care.
But when we think about home care and our vision from a Baptist health perspective, it's really about being able to meet the needs of our patients and provide the right care at the right time and in the right place. And it happens many times, it's at home.
So we have a nurse. There is a therapist. We have social workers who can go home to truly advance their ability to recover, take care of themselves, and provide education to them and their families to support their services. So when you think about home care, it just provides the right care, the right time, the right place, good quality, good service and outcomes, and the convenience of the place for patients and their families.
Unger: It sounds like a lot of good purpose. This year you announced a partnership with Alternate Solutions Health Network to enhance the services you are talking about. Please tell us more about the partnership and what it entails.
Dr. Myers: Yeah, Alternative Solution Health Network, this is a really good partnership for us. When I saw home care services, I realized that as the population continues to grow, we need to improve our capabilities in a very efficient way from a management team and technology perspective.
From a Baptist perspective, we have excellent home care services, excellent results. And in March this year, the joint venture was joined by an alternative Health Solutions Network. What they bring to the table is expertise, national expertise, and technology that aligns with our capabilities and services.
So what it sums up is to build on what we have already done, grow our business model and continue to provide superior quality care and services to our patients from a home care perspective.
UNGER: Now you mentioned what each partner brings to the table, so to speak. Why was the right time to do this now?
Dr. Myers: Well, I think the timing was right mainly due to the fact that we realised we needed to grow our services. And you need to do it in an efficient and cost-effective way. And that made us think, what is the best way to do this? You can continue to add resources. There was technology. Technology was on the rise.
And when we go out and look at the market, we call them Ashn. They had really good technology, excellent quality, and excellent references. And we are all about joint ventures when the opportunity is right. The good part about the joint venture is that we maintain the Baptist name. So it's still under Baptist health. And in the four markets we serve, we continue to improve our capabilities with better technology and provide high quality services.
Unger: That makes sense. So, partners bringing the technology to the table can scale their operations very quickly.
Dr. Myers: Absolutely.
Unger: And I know it's early. This came into effect in March. But do you have any sense of how this has progressed so far?
Dr. Myers: That's been going pretty well. So we've spent most of our time. This is only a few months, so we are really educating our staff as they are adjusting to our new partners as our staff are actually managing the process. So staff had to adapt to new technology. And it seems to be going well.
We have done really good results before, keeping our results moving forward, helping patients get better at home care and all the quality control of things. So I feel really good about where things have gone since my engagement with ASHN.
Unger: Now you're part of the integrated practice doctors section and I know from the meeting they had here at AMA. Value-based care is always a major priority. How do you speak – how does this investment in home health care support your value-based care work?
Dr. Myers: Well, when you think about value-based care, you still want to provide high quality care in a very cost-effective way. So what this actually can do for us, again, is to continue to provide high quality care. We have excellent technology, so we can continue to offer great results to our patients, from diagnosis to efficiency to business operations.
So this is a kind of win-win scenario, the best case scenario. So we help with the quality of care. At the same time, we are extremely cost-effective in our business processes.
Unger: Now you clearly see a lot of value from home health services. I'm interested, when you think about the future, when you think about expanding it, are you going to expand the series of things you're doing now? Or is it the number of people you deal with? What do you think about the expansion?
Dr. Myers: Well, when we think about expansion, it means that we can take on more volumes in the same period and see our volume and growth. What we can do with the joint ventures and their technology, and the efficiency that comes with the technology they bring to the table, allows us to track things in a more efficient way. It allows you to gather information and coordinate care in a more efficient way.
So, this is really very exciting for us. And this is what we want to do. We hope to not only provide care, but also help fewer patients with better transitions, readmissions in the process.
This is what we can do with this joint venture. And then there's the data and reporting aspect. There you can track, trend and report what we're doing. So, if you look at what you need to fine tune, the data itself and functionality are very important.
Unger: Last week you met many other health system leaders across the country at the AMA's Insight Network event held at our annual meeting. It's interesting to see if there are any important priorities or learning you've taken from it.
Dr. Myers: It was the first time I'd been to an AMA meeting in a long time. It's been a while. And I say to you, the summit was. I was very well back from that particular meeting. Because I really felt that it was done at a very high level that addressed many of the concerns we face as a health system.
And listening to them talking about what other systems are doing in a particular field, access to care, technology, the challenges they face, and the challenges they face is a truly great idea. As a matter of fact, I met with the group and held a strategy meeting with the neuroscience team yesterday. And we talked about one of the things that were presented at that meeting regarding your same day visit using your advanced practice clinician.
But you do it so that you consider a specific diagnosis that they are happy to treat and meet the patient on the same day. Implement it from neuroscience. Everyone is really excited about it. But that's just one of many things that came out of that meeting. But I thought it was very well done. And that was enough. There wasn't that much. A wonderful friendship. And I made some good connections from a networking perspective.
UNGER: Well, Dr. Myers, that certainly sounds like you enjoyed yourself and felt the meeting was valuable. And I was thrilled to meet you. And I'm so grateful to come to today's show and let us know how Baptist health is going.
Dr. Myers: Ah, thank you. And thank you for the time today. I enjoyed it.
UNGER: Well, if you find this discussion valuable, you can support such programming by becoming an AMA member of AMA-Assn.org/joinnow. That concludes today's episode. I'll be back soon with another AMA update. Subscribe to new episodes and find all your videos and podcasts at AMA-Assn.org/podcasts. Thank you for participating today. Please be careful.
Disclaimer: The perspectives expressed in this video are those of participants and do not necessarily reflect the AMA's views or policies.
