Tim Gronniger Explains Concerns Hospital Leaders Have for the Future of Value-Based Care

Hospital leaders are concerned about how to get ready to take on more risk, said Tim Gronniger, MPP, MHSA, senior vice president of development and strategy at Caravan Health.

Transcript

When working with hospital leaders, how do you discuss the future of ACOs in the United States?

That’s a big question. We talk about a lot of different things with our clients, and the reading we’re getting from Washington, very clearly, is that Medicare wants ACOS to take risk. So, a lot of our discussions lately have been around, how do you get ready for that world? What sort of systems and competencies do you need to put in place? What does your staffing model need to look like? What do you need to do to work more effectively with your physicians, and like we talked about a little bit earlier this morning, what do you need to do to make sure your large enough to be able to take risk effectively?

What concerns are top of mind for the providers and hospital systems that you work with?

There’s the joke that every health system CEO has a to-do list that’s about a hundred items long, and they only get to the first 10 on the list. So, at any given day in my world, they’re worrying about what’s going to be happening with CMS policy. They’re worrying about what’s happening with their staff. They’re worrying about what their performance is over the last month and over the last quarter on metrics that we track, and they’re always planning for the next year as well. So, the initial work in our model is geared around getting ready to put in place practices, build up primary care capacity, and get hired and trained the right kind of nursing support to deliver effective preventive and primary care, and then, to track performance on metrics that will determine success in the AC over time.