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Interview with Jeffrey Weinstein, Executive Director of Hunterdon Healthcare Partners
Dr. Robert Pickoff interviews Jeff Weinstein, Director of Hunterdon Healthcare Partners
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Dr. Robert Pickoff, Chief Medical Officer for Hunterdon Healthcare, interviews Jeffrey Weinstein, Executive Director of Hunterdon Healthcare Partners. Jeff explains what Hunterdon Healthcare Partners is and who they represent.
Jeffrey Weinstein
Executive Director
Hunterdon Healthcare Partners
Transcript
Doctor Pickoff:
Welcome to Hunterdon HealthCast brought to you by Hunterdon Healthcare, your source for health information from leading physicians and experts. I’m Doctor Robert Pickoff. I’m the Chief Medical Officer for Hunterdon Medical Center and today my guest is Mr. Jeffrey Weinstein who is the Executive Director for Hunterdon Healthcare Partners.
Jeff, patients in the community probably have seen the name Hunterdon Healthcare Partners in their physicians’ offices. Could you explain to us what the organization is and how it got started?
Jeffrey Weinstein:
Sure, first thank you for having me and giving me the opportunity to explain to the community more of the services that we provide and exactly what Hunterdon Healthcare Partners is and who we represent. Hunterdon Healthcare Partners is an Integrated Delivery System. We are currently made up of over 220 physicians located in over 4 counties. In addition, we have the Hunterdon Medical Center. We have the Hunterdon Center for Surgery. We have the Hunterdon Endosurgery suite, and we have free standing radiology sites, such as Brem’s Court and King’s Court. In addition, we’ve got Home Health Care, we have aides, we have hospice, and we have PT sites in the counties that we serve. We came together as an organization to help improve the quality of the care, improve access to care, and bring down the cost of care to those individuals that we’re serving, and that reaches far beyond the four county area as we have patients that come to us from Pennsylvania, from New York, and from other parts of the New Jersey area.
Doctor Pickoff:
So from the point of view of the patient, I think the key points are, what is the difference between medical care and integrated medical care?
Jeffrey Weinstein:
Integrated medical care gives us the ability to bring together the various parties that I mentioned earlier together to discuss methods of care, to work together to share clinical information that’s been garnered on the patients that we’re treating so that we’re able to make sure that, regardless of where they go in the system and throughout the continuum of care, people know what’s necessary to treat them and make the experience both from a quality standpoint and from your patient interaction standpoint a better experience than you would have if you went to a physician who simply just sends a letter to another physician versus being able to share the information. We’ve taken it a step further also, in that we’ve, actually working with the physicians in our organization, working with the medical center, we’ve been able to develop protocols where we looked at patients with the same type of issues treated in a similar fashion. We’ve seen success in that, in that two of our practices, two of our Endocrinology practices have just received recognition from “Bridges to Excellence” for the quality of care that they’ve rendered to our diabetics, but that goes beyond our specialty Endocrine practices, and we’ve seen because our Family Practices have followed the protocols that were developed with the input of these specialty physicians that year after year when we audit how care is being given, we just continually see a higher quality of care on raising the bar on how patients are treated.
Doctor Pickoff:
So that’s basically outpatient care that you’re referring to. I mean, we spend a lot of time and effort measuring, monitoring, and reporting quality of in-patient care, so the integration part of care allows your organization to measure the same degree of quality…
Jeffrey Weinstein:
On the out-patient side.
Doctor Pickoff:
…for care that’s on the out-patient…
Jeffrey Weinstein:
That’s correct.
Doctor Pickoff:
…which is unique for integrated care?
Jeffrey Weinstein:
It’s not only unique for integrated care, it’s more unique because we’re an organization made up of both employed and private practice physicians. There are other organizations, you’ve heard them in the news, where physicians are fully employed, such as Kaiser, and though they have systems similar to ours, it’s real easy to implement in that environment where all the employees, all the physicians, are direct employees of the system. To be able to do it in an organization where two thirds of the physicians are private practice physicians, that is what is unique about our organization, probably unique… will not find it elsewhere in the country.
Doctor Pickoff:
Can you talk a little bit about the Electronic Medical Record that is part of your organization?
Jeffrey Weinstein:
I mentioned earlier that one of the things that we’ve done is develop this series of protocols and those protocols we use to improve the quality of care. I also mentioned earlier that we try to share information from practice to practice. Right now, in the environment that most people practice in, that’s a paper transfer. If I walk into my cardiologist’s office and I didn’t bother to tell my primary care I was going there my cardiologist doesn’t necessarily have access to the information that my primary care has had in my medical chart. We’re in the process of implementing an Electronic Medical Record which is in enterprise-wide solution. When we’re complete, which will be sometime next year, probably January or February, we will have over a hundred and fifty providers made up of both primary care and specialty physicians that are capable of sharing information seamlessly from one practice to the next. So if I were to go to my cardiologist’s office in that environment, my cardiologist would know the blood work that I had done, at my primary care, would know my history that might have been collected at the primary care, he’s in a better situation to treat me knowing my full medical history. We’ve also found that very often patients walk in the office and they’re new to the office and the first thing they’re handed is a clipboard, and on that clipboard is paper where they’re supposed to remember their entire medical history, as well as medications that they might be on, past surgeries, anything of that nature. It’s not always easy to remember at that time. In this environment, you’ll walk into that specialty office and that specialist will automatically have access to that information. Now, we are concerned about confidentiality. We are concerned about individuals who might say “I don’t to participate,” so, as in everything else we’ve done, we’ve done it somewhat unique in that we are giving the patients the option to opt out of the sharing of information. It doesn’t mean that your physician won’t have ability to store your information on his visit electronically, but he won’t, in that case, have the opportunity to get pertinent medical information from some of your other providers. What we have found so far is less than one percent of the patients given the opportunity to opt out are doing so, but it still, we felt it was import to take individuals concerns about their privacy into consideration.
Doctor Pickoff:
Now the other part of the spectrum of medical care in the community is when patients need to be admitted to Hunterdon Medical Center, what’s the impact of integration and your organization on their care once they’re admitted to the hospital?
Jeffrey Weinstein:
That’s a good question. I’m glad you brought it up. What happens around the state, in fact, not only around the state but in most facilities around the country, there are physicians that have the exclusive right to provide care in a medical center. Typically they’re the Radiologists, the Emergency Room Physicians, the Pathologists, and the Anesthesiologists. When you as an individual are choosing care, those are probably the four specialties where you don’t often get the opportunity to choose who’s going to provide the care to you. You do rely upon the hospital and the Hunterdon Medical Center does, I think, a superior job in credentialing and selecting those providers who provide that care, but what’s unique to our system is all four of those specialties are members of Hunterdon Healthcare Partners. What that means to you is, if you are in the need of in-patient care or even out-patient care delivered directly at the Medical Center, and any of those four specialties are part of delivering that care, you have peace of mind of knowing that they participate in the plans that most of the patients in our service area are covered under. So you’re not going to get that unexpected “out of network” bill or that large expense that you weren’t expecting because you saw in “in network” surgeon, you came to an “in network” facility and all of a sudden you’re receiving a surprise bill from the anesthesiologist or pathologist or radiologist. That doesn’t happen here and I think that’s something we’ve done to help bring down the cost of care but still assure high quality of care.
Doctor Pickoff:
Great! The last question I want to ask you. There’s a lot people are hearing about the future of healthcare, healthcare reform, and of course that’s probably the subject of a few other podcasts but, in terms of how integrated care and your organization positions the Hunterdon Medical Center and the people who live in Hunterdon County towards the future, is integration what people are talking about in general?
Jeffrey Weinstein:
Integration is clearly the model that people are looking at, and I mentioned earlier places such as Kaiser. We keep hearing that that’s the model, but that’s an employed model, and it’s an integrated model that will give us the ability to reach those same levels, still allowing physicians who want to be in private practice to do so yet be part of the overall group that’s delivering the high quality cost effective care in our community.
Doctor Pickoff:
Terrific. Jeff, if people in the community want more information on Hunterdon Healthcare Partners, is there a resource out there they can access?
Jeffrey Weinstein:
Yes, they can reach us through our Web site which is HunterdonHealthcarePartners.org or dot com.
Doctor Pickoff:
Terrific. Thanks for coming today. I appreciate your information. I’m sure people found it very interesting. For members of the community, if you want more information on Hunterdon Healthcare in general, you can visit our Web site which is www.HunterdonHealthcare.org If you have suggestions for future topics for podcasts, you can email me directly from the podcast page on our Web site, and if you need a physician we have a Physician Referral Service which can be reached at 1-800-511-4462. Thank you for listening.