Nineteen rural Nebraska hospitals band together to enhance care

Nineteen rural Nebraska hospitals announced Thursday they're joining together to bolster the services they offer.

The network includes hospitals from across the state.

It's called the Nebraska High Value Network. The goal of the partnership is to enhance care, control costs for patients and allow its member hospitals to coordinate.

Tyler Toline, the CEO and President of Franciscan Health in West Point, said the ability to more formally collaborate with other rural hospitals in the state was a large reason for Franciscan Health joining the network.

“It'll be nice to have providers that have peers in similar looking facilities that will be able to collaborate, to share best practices,” Toline said. “The one I use is, like colonoscopies. Well, we have a large agriculture base. Let's be honest, to get those farmers to come in to do their colonoscopies is hard. And so what are some of the tactics, what are some of the mechanisms that other facilities have done to be successful?”

Something that insurance companies, also known as payers, want is scale. According to Toline, insurance companies don’t want to have to learn how 19 different hospitals are operating. That's where the network comes in.

Nate White is the President and CEO of Cibolo Health, the company overseeing the network. Part of Cibolo Health’s oversight is helping in the creation of what are called clinically integrated networks. Within these clinically integrated networks, hospital leaders decide on goals and metrics they all want to meet.

“[Insurance companies] don't have to try to track 19 different small hospitals with limited volume and limited resources,” White said. “So by coming together as a network, [rural hospitals] are able to create scale and you know now take care of groups of 10,000 lives, when they pull together as a group of hospitals.”

Having access to the clinically integrated network allows the hospitals to see which patients have gaps in care, as well as how they are meeting those metrics. According to White, preventative care has become a focus, particularly because as he said, preventative care is cheaper in the long run when compared to treating larger issues in the future.

“The data and the literature is pretty clear that if they're not coming in and doing that preventative wellness, they're going to cost the system more and they're going to be, in the long run, less healthy,” White said.

The network requires members to come together and figure out what those metrics and goals are. Toline said that preventative care and getting patients in that do not normally come in have become two of those goals.

"The payers want us to do preventative care. They want us to get those screenings,” Toline said. “And ultimately, before we joined this network, there are some people that are attributed to us that we never see. Well, now we'll have resources and tools to help us facilitate reaching out to them and trying to make contact and trying to get them in. And that's really exciting.”

The Nebraska High Value Network, while now consisting of 19 hospitals, is currently working with other rural Nebraska hospitals interested in joining.