Anthem Blue Cross And Blue Shield Rewards Providers Who Meet ICC Care Coordination Criteria

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Move furthers the integration of healthcare to improve patient outcomes and reduce redundancy.

The Joint Commission announced Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield will become the first health plan to reward healthcare providers who meet the Commission’s Integrated Care Certification (ICC) criteria for coordinated care. ICC is a voluntary certification that reviews how well a healthcare organization can handle information sharing including handoffs, IT integration, and other integration points, and ICC can help foster collaboration, highlight risk sharing, reduce adverse events, promote patient-centered-care, and identify and reduce redundancies.

“The Joint Commission applauds Anthem for recognizing the value our Integrated Care Certification brings to its participating hospitals, medical staff, and most importantly, the thousands of members in Anthem’s plans who use Joint Commission-accredited and certified organizations for their healthcare needs each year,” stated Mark Pelletier, RN, MS, chief operating officer, Accreditation and Certification Operations, The Joint Commission.

The ICC program was begun in July 2015 to recognize those hospitals and ambulatory care settings or physician networks that demonstrated excellent integration of information sharing, care transitions, communications’ hand-offs, and other transitions of patient care between healthcare settings. The Certification process aims to improve patient outcomes by connecting care across care settings and over time.

“Anthem’s recognition of this standard is a great example of our collaboration with doctors and hospitals to shift the healthcare payment model to one focused on quality rather than quantity,” Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield President Erin Hoeflinger stated. “Simplifying these processes has the added benefit of reducing the administrative burden of meeting those standards.”

“Hospitals and ambulatory care and physician networks that achieve Integrated Care Certification demonstrate a profound commitment to patient safety and continuity of care. We are very happy that Anthem realizes this importance of evaluating coordination of care as patients enter and leave the acute care setting,” Pelletier explained.

In order to qualify for ICC, a healthcare organization must be located in the U.S. or territories (or be operation by the U.S. government or under charter of the U.S. Congress); must be a Joint Commission-accredited hospital or critical access hospital that is integrating with physician practices or networks or a Joint Commission-accredited ambulatory organization integrating with a hospital; and must be working toward improving outcomes through integration and coordination of care.