Wesley Chick, vice president of payer strategies at Nashville, Tenn.-based Covenant Physician Partners, spoke with “Becker’s Ambulatory Surgery Centers Podcast” about his top strategies for dealing with payers.
This is an excerpt. Click here to download the full episode.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Question: What are your top priorities for today?
Wesley Chick: As a provider, my first and foremost priority is to build value through rate enhancements, With the providers, mostly everything is still on a fee-for-service basis. My goal is to ensure that we’re able to keep the lights on and pay the bills.
But another primary objective is to promote the strengths that we have in the gastroenterology and ophthalmology space. We basically have the full continuum of care model where we employ the physician, and then we invest in all the ancillaries that support those roles — mostly from an outpatient basis. What it does is give the patients a much greater access to preventive care, which prevents a lot of long-term hospitalization and illnesses and even extreme diagnoses like colon cancer.
So what we try to do is really promote because we’re able to manage that continuum of care. We’re able to actually provide low-cost, high-quality care that has been proven by many of our payers across the country to be the most efficient.
Finally, we also aim to build brand loyalty with our payer community. I think that we’re out there with a million other providers that are trying to take out a piece of the pie. I think that the more that we can promote our total-cost-of-care initiatives, providing that access to their members and delivering that high-quality care, I feel that we’re kind of positioning ourselves to be at the forefront of their value-based care initiatives.
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