Newswise — The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Health System (together known as Johns Hopkins Medicine, or JHM), has been awarded a $19.9 million grant by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), over a three-year period, to improve the quality and efficiency of health care delivered to JHM patients.
The grant is part of CMS’s $1 billion Healthcare Innovation Challenge, a competitive initiative that seeks to identify and support innovative opportunities to improve care delivery and achieve its three-part aim of “improving the individual experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita costs of care for populations.”
“This grant gives us the unique opportunity to expedite our work to reform health care delivery, provide increased value to our patients, and improve the health of our community,” says Edward D. Miller, M.D., dean/CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine.
According to Miller, the Johns Hopkins Community Health Partnership (J-CHiP), recipient of the grant, will create a unique Baltimore-based partnership to achieve the three-part aim through the collaboration of many entities: The Johns Hopkins University, including the university’s schools of medicine, nursing and public health; Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, one of the largest primary care networks in Maryland; Johns Hopkins Home Care Group, the full-service home care provider arm of JHM; the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute; CMS; the state of Maryland; the city of Baltimore; Priority Partners, a Medicaid managed care organization owned jointly by Johns Hopkins and the Maryland Community Health System, a consortium of federally qualified health centers including Baltimore Medical System; five local skilled nursing facilities; and several other community organizations. J-CHiP will work closely with community representatives to ensure that its efforts are directly responsive to the unique needs of the East Baltimore community.
“This grant will permit the J-CHiP program to have a significant impact on JHM care delivery,” Miller says. “By its third year, J-CHiP will reach over 50,000 patients; create over 100 innovative health care jobs, such as care coordinators, behavioral coaches and nurse case managers; and train or retrain thousands of health care workers. By reducing unnecessary admissions and readmissions, emergency department visits and other expenditures through improved care coordination and high-quality care programs, J-CHiP will simultaneously reduce health care costs.” Through improved care measures, it is estimated that the J-CHiP program could save Medicare and Medicaid just over $50 million during the three-year window.
According to Miller, J-CHiP will accelerate ongoing efforts to promote high-quality, patient-centered care by:
• Improving community health and reducing health disparities for the underserved East Baltimore population in the seven zip codes surrounding The Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center (JHBMC) by coordinating and enhancing primary care services for Medicare and Medicaid patients with chronic disease, substance abuse, and/or mental illness. These patients account for a disproportionate share of health care services and dollars. Full integration of behavioral health care into care delivery is a key feature of J-CHiP.
• Improving acute and post-acute care delivery using transdisciplinary care coordination that will touch nearly every patient admitted to JHH and JHBMC. This program builds on the ongoing efforts of the Johns Hopkins Health System Readmissions Task Force, and it includes a bundled intervention: multidisciplinary rounds, risk screening for post-acute services, medication management, patient-family education and post-acute transition services. It will forge partnerships with five skilled nursing facilities in the neighboring seven zip codes to deploy JHBMC Care Center best practices and staff to avert unnecessary returns to acute care.
Because of the importance of this CMS grant and its potential to transform how Johns Hopkins delivers health care, it will be directed by the top leadership of JHM. Miller will initially serve as project director for J-CHiP, a role that will be assumed by incoming Dean/CEO Paul Rothman on July 1. Patricia Brown, president of Johns Hopkins HealthCare LLC (JHHC), will act as deputy project director. Miller and Brown, as well as Johns Hopkins physicians, faculty, administrators, medical directors, behavioral health experts, nurses and other staff, have been working for months to refine and improve the J-CHiP program while awaiting a funding decision.
According to Brown, J-CHiP will be further strengthened by JHHC’s longstanding successful experience in managing a major Medicaid managed care program and championing innovative care delivery models in support of population health. A leader in innovative health care solutions, JHHC was created in 1995 as a partnership between the Johns Hopkins Health System and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to develop and administer contractual health care relationships with managed care organizations, government programs, employers and health care providers.
A major focus will be the health of the surrounding East Baltimore community. J-CHiP will work to reduce glaring health disparities in East Baltimore and translate its experience to inform other urban medical centers around the country. “J-CHiP will create new jobs, strengthen community and public-private partnerships, improve the quality of care for our patients and better enable JHM to serve as a ‘public trust,’” Brown says. “By developing and testing health care innovations, as a ‘learning laboratory,’ JHM seeks to demonstrate how academic medical centers can add significant value to care delivery in the health care reform era.”
John M. Colmers, JHM vice president of transformation and strategic planning adds, “JHM aims to become a leader in providing integrated, patient-centered care across the care continuum. The J-CHiP program, and federal grant funding in support of it, takes us one giant step closer to that goal.”
For more information about Johns Hopkins HealthCare, and Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, visit these links:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/business/healthcare.html
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/community_physicians/
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