Partnership empowers community health centers to thrive in value-based care arrangements through unified population health insights
Aledade
Azara Healthcare
Bethesda, MD and Burlington, MA, June 27, 2024 – Aledade, the nation’s largest network of independent primary care, and Azara Healthcare, the Best in KLAS provider of population health and value-based care solutions, announced today a partnership to empower the nation’s community health centers to thrive under value-based care arrangements. Community health centers, also known as federally qualified health centers, provide primary care and dental services, regardless of an individual’s ability to pay, in historically marginalized areas throughout the United States.
The partnership enables mutual clients to combine Aledade’s playbook – composed of a proprietary technology platform and in-person coaching – with actionable data and analytics provided by Azara Healthcare’s population health and value-based care platform, Azara DRVS, to help community health centers deliver better care to the patients they serve.
“Community health centers provide the backbone of primary care for our nation’s historically marginalized communities,” said Peggy Evans, Vice President of Community Health Center Performance at Aledade. “We have had a longstanding commitment at Aledade to support preventive, coordinated care that generates better outcomes at these centers while also improving their financial sustainability. Azara Healthcare shares this commitment, and we are excited to partner with them so these centers can fulfill their mission to provide quality and compassionate primary and preventive care.”
With this partnership, Azara will share critical patient data with Aledade and mutual clients, empowering participating community health centers with clear summaries of patient needs, leading to better patient visits and helping ensure no opportunity to deliver necessary care is missed. These data-driven insights better position mutual clients to meet patient needs and improve health outcomes.
“Our partnership dramatically strengthens community health centers that focus on ACO models, whether it’s Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, the Medicare Shared Savings Program, ACO REACH or ACO Primary Care Flex, which launches in January 2025 and is designed to advance health equity,” Evans added.
Recent research shows the power of a unified solution to support value-based care program needs regardless of whether providers choose to take the journey into value-based care on their own, with other healthcare groups, or in partnership with a value-based care physician enablement company such as Aledade. Value-based care physician enablement companies open new opportunities for providers and health plans to access the support they need to maximize resources and fulfill their contracts.
“Azara Healthcare and Aledade understand the unique challenges Community Health Centers face,” said Jeff Brandes, President & CEO of Azara Healthcare. “Sharing DRVS data with Aledade provides a new level of value-based care enablement and empowers our health center clients to deliver better care and achieve financial stability. We look forward to working with Aledade and our mutual clients to further enhance the capabilities of the Azara platform to deliver high value information within existing DRVS clinical workflows. Our provider clients have been very clear that they need a consistent way to prepare and care for patients, regardless of contract or insurance type.”
Aledade and Azara Healthcare both have deep experience in empowering community health centers to succeed in value-based care payment models. In 2022, 99% of Aledade’s more than 200 community health center members – located in 37 states – earned shared savings. This equated, under the Medicare Shared Savings Program, to a total of $53.5 million in earnings that enabled these centers to hire additional staff as well as improve health equity and expand services for the more than 440,000 patients who receive care through Aledade partnerships.
Azara Healthcare’s award-winning population health platform unifies clinical, health plan, health information exchanges and social determinants of health data to deliver a complete picture of patient health. Azara solutions empower nearly 600 community health centers in 42 states to improve the quality and efficiency of care for more than 25 million Americans through actionable data.
“We are very excited to see Aledade and Azara Healthcare, two of our strategic partners working together on behalf of our community health center members. We believe that this represents a meaningful first step in simplifying the flow of the critical data necessary for our members’ providers to be successful, and we look forward to seeing this develop into a true bi-directional data exchange that will be able to directly impact our members’ patient care workflows.” said Joseph Grice, Chief Value Officer, Community Health Center Association of Mississippi.
