HealthCare Partners puts a focus on senior care

HealthCare Partners Nevada, an Intermountain Healthcare company, has brought the senior population an extra level of care across Southern Nevada, including Pahrump.

Just over a year ago, the HealthCare Partners clinic in Pahrump added a myGeneration Senior Clinic. The myGeneration clinic has brought benefits like getting to see a provider quickly and other pluses for the roughly 6,000 Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients that can utilize its services.

According to Brian Anderson, administrative director at HealthCare Partners in Pahrump, having access to care is important for the senior population.

“Most of these patients we see three to four times a year, so we need to create that access and get them in when they need us,” he said.

The myGeneration clinic opened in Pahrump in October 2018, but the myGeneration concept started roughly over two years ago.

“We started it just to play with the idea, the business model, kind of like a pilot at our North Rainbow location and our Green Valley location,” Anderson said. “After six months, we definitely saw the benefits. We saw better utilization, saw better patient satisfaction, greater access, so separating the lines of business was beneficial for our patients and our company. We decided to move forward and roll that out.”

The rollout was staggered over the last year, “and Pahrump was the last set of clinics to go forward with the transition.”

Today, there are 28 myGeneration clinic locations, including Pahrump, in Southern Nevada.

The myGeneration clinic in Pahrump works with Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients.

About 4,800 of the patients that utilize the myGeneration clinic in Pahrump carry Humana Medicare Advantage plans with roughly 1,000 patients carrying regular Medicare.

“In July, we cut off any new Medicare patients joining Medicare Advantage MyGen pods or clinics, but we still have that resource for them on the traditional fee for service side,” Anderson said.

New model

Opening the clinics changed HealthCare Partners’ business model: “… instead of having a hybrid model where the providers have to be experts on everything and deal with 20 different insurance companies, they only have to focus on Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans.”

This “frees up the providers to have more of a one-to-one and a better understanding of what the plan benefits are offered to the patients and they can talk that through with the patients,” Anderson said.

This also gives patients extra time with the doctor; each appointment in the clinic gives patients at least a 30-minute appointment with their doctor.

“It could be more, depending on what the need is,” Anderson said. “Before, it was 15-30 depending on what you were coming in for.”

By bringing in the myGeneration clinic, providers will have a smaller number of patients they are responsible for.

“What we did is we limited the amount of the panel size for providers, so instead of them having a panel size of 1,200 patients when it was mixed, now it’s down to 600-700,” Anderson said. “That creates more access where we can live by our standards of seeing patients within two days, new patients in two weeks. That was another big benefit of it, the access to the provider.”

Same-day appointments are also available for urgent cases at the myGeneration clinic pods.

“We try to do the same thing for our fee-for-service pod, try to do same-day slots, for access,” he said. “It’s just hit or miss, depending on what the patient’s calling for, but we do have that option as well.”

There’s an extra push in the myGeneration clinic pods in Pahrump to get patients served faster.

“The reason we have an overall extra push on the MyGen side to have that same-day access is because those patients can only see us,” Anderson said. “The Humana (Medicare Advantage) patients have to come to us.”

HealthCare Partners takes two of Humana’s health plans: Humana HMO Medicare Advantage and Humana PPO Medicare Advantage. HealthCare also takes some of UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare Advantage plans and accepts regular Medicare as well.

HealthCare Partners Nevada was acquired by Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare earlier in 2019. HealthCare Partners Nevada has several clinics and other offerings across Southern Nevada, including Pahrump.

Intermountain has holdings in Utah, Idaho and Nevada. Intermountain is an integrated health system and has clinics, physician group, hospitals and telehealth services.

For more information on myGeneration clinics, go to hcpnv.com/mygeneration or call 775-727-5700.

Contact reporter Jeffrey Meehan at jmeehan@pvtimes.com, on Twitter @MeehanLv