Retinopathy Screening
We’re excited to announce that, as part of our mission to help PCPs succeed in their value-based care contracts, Thea Health’s provider communication system now offers diabetic retinopathy screening at the point of care. Studies have shown that telemedicine is an accurate and cost-effective way to screen for retinopathy and prevent blindness. We’ve been testing this program over the last few months and have seen great results. Here’s what one of our PCP partners, Dr. Harris Cohen at Hatboro Medical Associates, has to say about it: “Retinopathy screening has been a challenge to our practice, especially in our pay-for-performance patient population. Having the ability to screen patients at the point of care with our in-office machine not only improved our screening numbers, but has allowed our practice to provide better overall care to our diabetic population.”New Team Member
Noah Levan has come on board to lead our operations team. Noah joins us from One Medical where he led some of the highest performing administrative teams in the organization and brings with him a depth of knowledge about primary care innovation built from working closely with providers to deliver high quality care. He’ll be streamlining our on-boarding, practice transformation, and revenue-cycle efforts. If you’d like to say hi to Noah, you can reach him at noah@theahealth.com.Things I’ve Been Reading
- Applications have recently closed for the first year of the Primary Care First (PCF) model from CMS which is slated to start in 2021. It is a definite improvement on the CPC+ model and could have big upsides for PCPs (especially those with high medicare loads or in areas with strong private payer support for the program) and help seriously ill patients if implementation goes well. I found this argument that the program would be more effective if it included support for behavioral health integration really compelling. (Look out for more on behavioral health in our product in the coming months.)
- The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has been pushing hard for interoperability through new rule making, but unfortunately Epic is lobbying hard to stop their progress.
- A recent study explored how eConsults can improve equity of access to care. It showed that eConsults can help close the gaps in access to care across underserved groups including the frail elderly, the homeless, those with special needs, and the transgender community.
If you’d like to learn more, feel free to reach out via email at harry@theahealth.com.
Take care,
Harry