Blue Shield Vice President and General Manager of Premier and Labor Accounts Diana Gibson Pace[/caption]BY DIANA GIBSON PACE – As the U.S. healthcare landscape continues to evolve, employers who provide benefit coverage for their employees are increasingly focused on offering high-performance health plans that deliver a positive experience for their employees, help improve workforce health and meet the company’s objectives for quality, efficiency and affordability.
This is an especially important issue for companies with employees in multiple states who want to ensure consistent healthcare coverage no matter where their employees live and work. This was a topic I addressed recently at Blue Shield of California’s Executive Forum with key brokers, focusing on how our organization is shaping tomorrow’s healthcare, today.
At Blue Shield, we have been working for many years to more deeply engage hospitals and providers to give our members access to quality care that is efficient and patient-focused. Based on this effort, we have developed a proven model – our brand of Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) – that fosters an ecosystem of shared responsibility across key stakeholder groups: doctors, hospitals and Blue Shield.
Earlier this year, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association launched Blue Distinction Total Care (BDTC) to provide employees access to locally developed value-based care programs – like our ACOs – on a national scale. The program is delivering significant results across multiple markets, and here in California we are taking the successes from our HMO ACO experience and applying them to our PPO ACOs.
Employees in California and beyond now have access to these locally developed value-based programs that have been proven to drive improved quality and value, with results such as lowered costs, reduced employee absenteeism and improved employee population health. We will continue to work closely with our provider partners to share and implement best practices to improve the quality of care and offer a customer experience worthy of our family and friends.
For employers, the BDTC program offers flexible solutions to meet business goals and address the need for providing quality healthcare for employees while reducing healthcare cost trends, both inside and outside of California.
With the addition of the BDTC program to our nationally recognized ACO program, we’ve added further rigor to our drive and our mission to improve value and patient outcomes for employers and employees.
Diana Gibson Pace is Vice President and General Manager of Blue Shield of California’s Premier and Labor Accounts