DHHS Senior Advisor Mardy Peal represented the Department on April 16, 2014 at the North Carolina Health Care Media Summit.  The half-day summit included two panels that discussed current trends in health care reporting. 

Peal, who led the team that presented DHHS’ Medicaid reform proposal to the General Assembly in March, took part in a panel discussion titled “How to Cover North Carolina’s Coming Health Care Reforms.”  The discussion focused on the state’s Medicaid proposal and how Accountable Care Organizations would change the way health care is delivered in North Carolina.

When asked about key points reporters should know about the DHHS proposal, Peal said it’s important to note the ACO model allows physicians and other providers who care for patients to take control of improving quality and healthy outcomes.

“The plan preserves the autonomy of the patient-physician relationship without an insurer coming in between the patient and the physician,” said Peal.  “And for the first time in North Carolina, physicians will be rewarded for rendering quality care. They will be measured on quality and they will be rewarded based on the kind of quality (outcomes) they deliver, so we are excited about that.”

Dr. Grace Terrell, CEO of Cornerstone Health Care, was also on Wednesdays’ panel.  As one of the most fully developed examples of accountable care in North Carolina, Dr. Terrell described patient successes and financial savings Cornerstone has been seeing since adopting the ACO model.

“In terms of savings, we are starting to get data from the Medicare Shared Savings model as well as from commercial payers,” Terrell said. The data shows a “continued decrease in utilization of readmissions to the emergency room and inappropriate admissions to the hospital. We are doing better than about 70 percent of all ACO’s in the country with many of these parameters in the shared savings model.”

Other panelists included Rep. Nelson Dollar and Sen. Louis Pate, who served on DHHS’ Medicaid Reform Advisory Group, Julian ‘Bo’ Bobbit, a partner at Smith Anderson, and Paul Mahoney, vice president for communications at Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC).  

To view the N.C. Health Care Media Summit, Part 1, “Health Care Reporting in an Age of Shrinking Newsrooms, the Internet, the Affordable Care Act and HIPAA,” visit: http://www.wral.com/news/video/13572239/

To view the N.C. Health Care Media Summit, Part 2, “How to Cover North Carolina’s Coming Health Care Reforms,” visit: http://www.wral.com/news/video/13572701/