OACHC and AndHealth Partner to Bring In-House Specialty Care + Specialty Pharmacy to Ohio’s Community Health Centers
30 Abril 2024 - 12:42PM
Business Wire
AndHealth announced today its partnership with the Ohio
Association of Community Health Centers (OACHC) which creates a
statewide Whole-Person Community Care Model for Ohio’s Community
Health Centers (CHCs) and the patients they serve. Ohio’s 59 CHCs,
which make up Ohio’s largest primary care system, have an efficient
pathway to add high-quality, affordable, and culturally competent
whole-person specialty care and specialty pharmacy to their
services. OACHC and AndHealth have established a master agreement
that makes statewide adoption of this critical patient service as
cost-effective and efficient as possible by leveraging OACHCs deep
expertise, membership scale, and best practices.
The Whole-Person Community Care Model provides CHCs with more
patients, more clinical capabilities, and sustainable reimbursement
and funding by allowing them to deliver first-line specialty care
and pharmacy at the patient’s point of need—in their community at a
health center and in their home with convenient virtual options
that remove transportation and logistics barriers to fully
participating in care.
“AndHealth is a game-changer for CHCs and the patients they so
well serve. This partnership will help us expedite specialty access
to improve health outcomes and equity, and to reduce costs to the
overall healthcare system. The Community Whole Person Specialty
Care Model emphasizes the integrity of pharmacy reimbursement for
CHCs, and helps them grow their impact with new patients, while
creating diversified revenue streams,” said Julie DiRossi-King, CEO
of OACHC.
For the past 40 years, OACHC has supported the expansion of the
Health Center Program’s innovative model of care that improves
access to high-quality, comprehensive care, removes barriers and
health disparities, and allows communities to participate in the
delivery of their own care. Expansion of the CHC model is critical
to meet the needs of our medically underserved populations, who now
number 100 million Americans that each deserve access to high
quality care. CHCs have been proven to be our nation’s most
cost-effective way to meet the needs of this population, today
delivering exceptional care to 32 million Americans—making them
collectively our country’s largest primary care system. When
equipped with sustainable funding and broad, integrated clinical
capabilities, CHCs stand ready to meet our nation’s healthcare
access crisis and become America’s solution to achieving health as
a human right for all people in this country.
The specialty access crisis threatens all people, but especially
the medically underserved population that CHCs serve. Among this
population, 70% of patients cite affordability and transportation
challenges in accessing specialty care, and 50% of specialty
referrals are never even completed. These care gaps leave patients
exposed to disease progression, needless suffering, and escalating
costs for our healthcare system and have caused our nation’s safety
net providers and OACHC to recognize that CHCs can offer specialty
care in the communities where patients live—and in the medical home
that can best meet the needs of this unique population.
OACHC has come together with AndHealth to make it finally
possible to offer community-based whole person specialty care and
to solve this access crisis through a fully integrated, in-house
specialty care and specialty pharmacy solution that enables CHCs to
treat patients ionsite under their sliding fee scale, with
convenient access to both virtual and on-premises options for
patients. The model is economically sustainable for CHCs and
results in better outcomes, lower costs, and new patient growth
through community outreach and care coordination with other
hospital systems who use CHCs in the Community Whole-Person Care
Model as access points to deliver first-line specialty care.
The model allows CHCs to meet the specialty care needs of their
existing patients, while expanding the impact they have on their
communities through new patients that also need specialty care, or
that have been unable to access specialty medications. Lack of
access is an all-too-common occurrence in a specialty pharmacy
landscape that hasn’t generally been equipped to provide
comprehensive access solutions to medically underserved patients,
or a sliding fee scale. In aggregate across AndHealth’s partners,
67% of specialty care patients are new to the CHC and had been
lacking adequate access to care for their specialty and chronic
conditions.
Matt Scantland, Founder + CEO of AndHealth said, “It is an honor
to work alongside OACHC and our state’s CHCs to radically improve
access and outcomes for patients. Together, we can achieve our
shared dream of health as a fundamental human right we provide to
all people—by making CHCs an even bigger, more capable, and more
integrated part of our healthcare delivery system, removing
barriers to health for more people.”
About OACHC
The Ohio Association of Community Health Centers (OACHC) is the
nonprofit Primary Care Association (PCA) for Ohio’s Community
Health Centers (CHCs)—who are Ohio’s largest primary care
network.
Over the past 40 years, OACHC has supported the expansion of the
Health Center Program’s innovative model of care that improves
access to high-quality, comprehensive care; removes barriers and
health disparities; and allows communities to lead in the direction
of their own care.
OACHC is a noted thought leader in community and population
health, healthcare equity, and innovation that makes healthcare
more affordable and higher quality for all people. OACHC serves as
the chief convener for training and technical assistance (T/TA) for
Ohio’s CHCs, and as a national advocate for their work.
About AndHealth
AndHealth helps Community Health Centers (CHCs) radically
improve access and outcomes in specialty care and specialty
pharmacy for patients, while becoming an even larger and more
clinically integrated part of our healthcare system. The
Whole-Person Community Care Model provides everything CHCs need to
deliver in-house specialty care and specialty pharmacy, built for
the unique needs of our medically underserved populations.
The model provides CHCs with more patients, more clinical
capabilities, alignment with health systems, and sustainable
reimbursement and funding that restores the integrity of the
patient’s medical home and their critical reimbursement model—both
having shifted away from CHCs through external specialty referrals
and contract pharmacies. In restoring this integrity, CHCs can
stretch scarce federal resources to reach more patients with
comprehensive services that weren’t possible before and that are
desperately needed by patients—tearing down barriers to promote
health equity and demonstrating the power of the CHC movement and
its unique model of care.
Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, AndHealth is led by former
CoverMyMeds co-founder and CEO Matt Scantland and the team that
built Ohio’s first healthcare technology unicorn, by dedicating
their lives to collaborative innovation that improves access for
patients.
AndHealth, like OACHC, is dedicated to helping CHCs become an
even larger and more successful part of our healthcare system.
AndHealth is supported by key investors including the American
Medical Association’s innovation subsidiary, Francisco Partners,
and the state of Ohio’s economic development organization.
To learn more, visit AndHealth.com.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240430612589/en/
Julia Phillips VP, Marketing + Enablement AndHealth
press@andhealth.com