The union that represents casino workers in Atlantic City
has for years been experimenting with ways to reduce health-care costs for its
members while improving results.
The latest effort is a primary-care center opened this year
in Atlantic City by Unite Here Health, a national labor-management trust fund
that provides health benefits to 20,000 Unite Here Local 54 members and
dependents.
The center, which had its grand opening Tuesday, has three
physicians and a nurse-practitioner. It also has a pharmacy, laboratory
services, and a center for physical therapy.
Unite Here Local 54 members do not have to use the center,
but among the incentives is the absence of co-pays, an official said.
"The goal is for participants to have one-stop shopping
here and to also be able to connect the dots between those services, so that
they are not happening in silos," said Elizabeth Gilbertson, chief of
strategy for Unite Here Health, which is based in Aurora, Ill., and covers
200,000 nationally.
The primary-care center in Atlantic City, where the union's trust
fund spends $100 million a year, is Unite Here Health's first, though more are
planned in Las Vegas, union officials said.
There's a reason Atlantic City was first.
"The trajectory for the total cost of care here has
been more extreme in recent years than in any other part of our national trust
fund's experience," Gilbertson said of the Atlantic City region.
AtlantiCare, a nonprofit health system with hospitals in Atlantic
City and Galloway Township in Atlantic County, has a 64 percent market share,
according to a Fitch Ratings report last year.
That dominance has the union and employers looking for
alternatives.
"Because AtlantiCare is preoccupied with dictating everything
about health care and really doesn't want to work with large groups like
ourselves, we came to the conclusion several years ago that we have to start
taking control of it ourselves," said Bob McDevitt, president of Local 54.
McDevitt said AtlantiCare accounted for about 58 percent of
hospital stays by union members or their dependents and that the system had
raised prices year after year while the casino industry that employed his
members was in steep decline.
"The time came for us to get control of quality and
spend our money efficiently," McDevitt said.
An AtlantiCare executive, Steven Blumberg, called the new
center - a block from the AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center - "a welcome
addition to the community."
"We are always in need of more primary care," said
Blumberg, who attended the grand opening.
Since 2007, the union health fund and AtlantiCare have been
partners in a "special care center [that] was conceived to deliver
intensive outpatient care to patients with complex chronic illnesses,"
Gilbertson said.
More recently, the health fund, Caesars Entertainment Corp.,
and the Borgata have been collaborating on ways to save money. Among the
possibilities is a "a narrow network, the composition of which we're still
exploring," Gilbertson said.
Unite Here Health hired Continuum Health Alliance of Marlton
to manage the center. Continuum has more than 1,000 providers in its network.
Continuum is in the background and manages all the services
to enable that center to be effective and efficient, short of providing the
actual care coordination, said Christopher T. Olivia, Continuum's president.
"The union has its own care coordinators down there on
site. What we can do is support them with technology and information on the
performance of the center," Olivia said.
Source: Philly.com
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