At the Consumer Health World conference last week, representatives from community and state-run health care organizations presented innovative and value-based wellness models that bridge the private and public sectors.

Ruth E. Clark, executive director of Integrated Health Partners, a physician hospital organization in Battle Creek, Mich., spoke about a chronic care model designed to decrease the amount of outpatient procedures (currently 100,000 per year) and emergency room admissions (46,000 a year) in Southern Michigan.

With a population of 52,000 and only two major hospitals with less than 200 beds, Battle Creek depends on major corporations such as Kellogg Company and Denzo Manufacturing to provide jobs and health benefits.

Dr. Mary Ellen Benzik, a local family physician and member of the Battle Creek Health System medical staff, said, "In our region, patients with multiple chronic conditions represent at least 20% of the population and account for over 60% of the health care costs."

The Battle Creek collaborative model enlists passionate physicians like Dr. Benzik, officers of health care organizations and local companies to work symbiotically in turning the town's health problems around.

The initiative involves intensive coaching on care management and guidelines for targeted-patient treatment with face-to-face meetings. Under the program, multi-disciplinary teams, doctors and nurses rework their perspectives on health care with a greater focus on coaching and fostering an emotional connection between physicians and patients.

Clark said that the model is driven by the payer side, supported by the employer and using metrics to help monitor the plan's success. She further explained that the program extended follow-ups to include in-home visits, and multi-disciplinary teams worked especially well to improve clinical outcomes across all settings, yielding substantial savings, even in the absence of other interventions.

Blue Cross provided funding for the grassroots effort, which has shown increasing success over the program's lifespan; the organization started with 10 teams of health care and benefits officials in May of 2007 and grew to 28 teams five months later.

Work plans such as Battle Creek are available in 35 states under Medicaid, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana.

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