Texas Health joins health care reform: Partnership promotes preventative care to reduce treatment spending

Texas Health Resources announced its role in the national health care reform movement on Tuesday, unveiling a partnership whose goal is rooted in preventative care and education.

The hospital system -- which is the region's largest in terms of patients served -- entered a 10-year agreement with Healthways, a global provider of well-being improvement solutions. The collaboration is the first time Healthways has partnered with a largely integrated health system, as it has primarily worked with insurance carriers , employers and other smaller community entities.

By utilizing Healthway's evidence-based tools and methods, the physician-led partnership is perceived to increase overall health within the community, reduce health-related risks and the prevalence of chronic disease, and reduce complications from known chronic diseases. The preventative measures are also expected to keep more people out of the hospital, reducing the number of readmissions and, ultimately, lowering medical costs.

Such tools will also enable physicians to identify patterns of need while providing customized information to each individual patient, going beyond the doctor's visit or hospitalization period.

"We will focus on the health of the individual, not just their sickness or injury," said Doug Hawthorne, CEO of Texas Health Resources. "We know that the health care system in this country, in this state, in this region, is not sustainable as it currently exists. It's too expensive, it's too repetitive. We see many of the same people for the same reasons day in and day out. Our role will be beyond just the traditional hospital. We will look at the full continuum of service, from the time an individual is born to the time that they die."

Based in Nashville, Tenn., Healthways uses the science of lifestyle behaviors to produce and measure positive change in well-being for its customers, by employing a team of experts to optimize each individual's health and productivity. The company plans on using social networking media, telephonic outreach and interaction, remote monitoring and group programs emphasizing healthy behavior to help people make better choices, leading to less hospital visits.

For the past 30 years, Healthways has specialized in trying to help people improve their health, specifically those living with one or more chronic illnesses such as diabetes. The company has since broadened its role to bring preventative work into the equation, said Ben Leedle Jr., president and CEO of Healthways, Inc.

"It's more around how people choose their lifestyle behavior [and] how do we make that easy and simple for people to do," he said. "We're trying to help meet people with their preferences to help them begin to work on their well-being and bring experts in to that equation as we identify some of the gaps, whatever that might be."

Helping people make healthier choices requires more than just a hospital system, said Jeffrey Canose, president of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Plano. For example, the magnet hospital recently partnered with the city of Plano to use its recreation centers as "social aggregators," or vehicles for delivering the preventative health initiative. Schools, churches and workplaces are other examples of how Texas Health Resources plans to deploy the partnership's proactive goals and concepts, Canose said.

"We react to the behaviors people have adopted over the course of a lifetime, this is all about how to get in front of that," he said. "So much more needs to happen before and after the hospital visit."

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, more than a trillion dollars was spent on health care in the United States in 2009. Since 1996, more than 20 percent of total health care expenditures were used to treat 1 percent of the population who were considered the most ill; the top 5 percent considered most ill accounted for roughly half of those expenditures.

Internist Arash Tirandaz at Texas Health Plano said he is not the only doctor excited about the proactive approach, as many who fall in that top five percent are categorized as readmissions.

By reducing the number of emergency room and urgent-care visits, as well as cutting down on medications administered, a modified health system could decrease unnecessary expenditures, while making real progress in a patient's life, Tirandaz said.

"Through disease modification, tailored attention and data management, we can go a long way to prevent disease readmission and improve the quality of health care," he said. "There's no shortage of business, there are a lot of people who can use the hospital. What we want to do is help the system. Ultimately, the health care system is going to fail if we don't manage costs. One way to manage cost is to manage illness and disease. Then we can focus our energy on the other 95 percent to prevent them from becoming chronically ill."

For information about Healthways, visit www.healthways.com.

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