CVS Health division enters collaboration with Catholic Health

CVS Accountable Care Organization, a division of the CVS Health family of businesses, announced it has entered into a collaboration with Catholic Health and Catholic Health Physician Partner’s ACO to expand value-based care and health care access for Medicare beneficiaries across the Catholic Health Physician Network in the New York area. The partnership builds on Catholic Health’s ACOs program, improving care for over 40,000 Medicare beneficiaries in Nassau and Suffolk counties and saving millions of dollars by meeting quality and total cost of care goals. Catholic Health and CVS Accountable Care will jointly assume accountability for the health care of nearly 40,000 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries under the ACO Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health program. The new collaboration, the first of its kind on Long Island, will help to strengthen care coordination for patients by providing customized support, such as home-based care, transportation support for annual wellness visits and linkages to services for addressing social determinants of health. Additionally, it will help improve support for Catholic Health providers, especially primary care providers; enhance the health system’s care delivery service offerings, including adding same-day access, multidisciplinary chronic condition care management programs and analytics to allow physicians to provide top-of-license care; and utilize innovative value-based payments to incentivize providers. The agreement is based on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation’s redesigned direct contracting model, ACO REACH. ACO REACH prioritizes health equity, the coordination of care among health care providers to improve outcomes, and the reduction of unnecessary medical costs by moving patients toward value-based care.