New Coordinated Care Agreement Inked by CHE Trinity And Walgreens
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
New “innovative models of care” to be introduced to select markets.
In a press release, CHE Trinity Health, one of the nation’s leading healthcare systems, and the nation’s largest drugstore chain, Walgreens, announced a clinical care collaboration agreement to pursue innovative models of care in select markets the health care delivery system serves.
The proposed collaborative model enables retail clinic collaborations, outpatient pharmacy services, and expanded prescription and disease management programs that can help improve people's health while increasing consumers’ access and lowering overall healthcare costs.
Under the new model, Healthcare Clinic nurse practitioners and Walgreens pharmacists will work with CHE Trinity Health providers to further coordinate patient care while giving people access to a broad range of healthcare services at Walgreens and CHE Trinity Health sites of care.
In the news release, Alan London, Walgreen VP of strategic clinical partners, said, “Coordinated-care programs are vitally important to help ensure patients have access to the quality, convenient, affordable care they need before, during and after a hospital admission. Working with an integrated health system such as CHE Trinity Health offers an ideal opportunity to further leverage Walgreens healthcare assets to coordinate patient care across multiple regions of the country.”
CHE Trinity spokeswoman Carol Tingwall described the agreement as an “umbrella collaboration” that could vary region to region. CHE Trinity operates in 20 states. She explained, “This agreement does provide a menu of opportunities for each of our local ministries to consider and they will determine which are the most appropriate for their market. These will be local decisions made in local markets.”
The system's collaboration is set to extend beyond Walgreen's retail clinic operations and that CHE Trinity was looking to integrate Walgreen's pharmacists into collaborative efforts as well. The agreement will also incorporate information technology, like checking a patient's multiple prescriptions for possible harmful drug interactions, said Shelby Decosta, CHE Trinity Health senior vice president for mergers, acquisitions and partnership development.
Earlier this year, Walgreen’s announced it would have health information technology tools providing patient assessment and “individual predictive analytics” at the point of care available at 400 of its approximately 750 in-store Healthcare Clinics (formerly known as Take Care Clinics). It also entered into a similar collaborative agreement in January with Centura Health, an Englewood, CO-based, 15-hospital system jointly sponsored by Catholic Health Initiatives and the Adventist Health System.
Walgreen's main competitor in the retail clinic space, the CVS Caremark Corp.'s Minute Clinics, recently entered into collaborations with four Eastern health systems: Hartford (CO) HealthCare; Memorial Health, Savannah, GA.; Lahey Health, Burlington, MA; and Baystate Health, Springfield, MA.