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Delaware and Pennsylvania medical societies partner on value-based care

Delaware Public Media

The Medical Society of Delaware is partnering with Pennsylvania’s medical society, PAMED, to try to get physicians in each state to take on value-based care contracts with medical payers.

Value-based care is when doctors are incentivized to produce positive patient outcomes rather than being paid based on the number of tests and other services they provide. It’s meant to improve overall population health and reduce the cost of care.

MSD President Dr. Andrew Dahlke says he’s cautiously optimistic about the change.

“Every time that you change the payment model, people are going to change what they do in order to improve reimbursement for them, and we don’t what to lose sight that what really matters is the patient’s health and making sure that we keep our eye on that goal,” said Dahlke. “So, it’s something new and it has the potential to lower the cost of medicine, I just hope it doesn’t decrease access as they do it.”

Dahlke adds most Delaware doctors are on board with the value-based care model.

The new partnership between the Delaware and Pennsylvania medical societies seeks to negotiate value-based contracts with medical providers that will also be financially beneficial to physicians.

“For us to incentivize the doctors what we have to do is we have to come up with value-based contracts that will pay the doctors more than what they were making without the value-based contracts,” Dahlke said.

The two medical societies are partnering with the data mining company Health EC to track patient data and ensure patients are getting the care they need and not duplicative services.

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