[V]ermont’s biggest health reform company has begun to combine some of its operations with a similar company in upstate New York.
OneCare Vermont, which is jointly owned by the University of Vermont Medical Center and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, is now sharing its CEO with a company called Adirondacks ACO.
The move is the beginning of a plan to share more services between the Vermont and New York companies. CEO Todd Moore will be responsible for creating a plan to share additional resources, including staff members, over time.
OneCare is at the center of health care reform efforts called the all-payer model in Vermont. State officials have helped set up the company as a regulated monopoly — called an accountable care organization — that will serve as an intermediary between insurance companies and health care providers.
Starting Jan. 1, OneCare is scheduled to take control of $737 million in payments per year from commercial insurance companies, Medicaid and Medicare, then redistribute the money to doctors and hospitals based on the quality of care they give patients.
Adirondacks ACO is jointly owned by Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh, a member of the UVM Health Network, and Hudson Headwaters Health Network, an organization that runs 17 community health centers in upstate New York.
Moore, the senior vice president of accountable care and revenue strategy for the UVM Medical Center, is keeping his title as CEO of OneCare. Starting Oct. 1, he has held an additional title as CEO of Adirondacks ACO.
The administrative change is the latest step in a major relationship between the UVM Health Network and Hudson Headwaters Health Network. One of the UVM network’s hospitals says it will spend $4.7 million on a primary care building to be used by Hudson Headwaters.
Moore said he and his OneCare team “will continue to have our paychecks come from University of Vermont Medical Center, but increasingly so, the budgets of the ACOs will be the ones sort of paying the University of Vermont Medical Center to operate the ACO.”
Moore said discussions about him running Adirondacks ACO in addition to his current duties have been going on since late June or early July. He said he does not expect his new job will stretch him too thin.
“I already spend some time over there,” Moore said, and any additional time he spends in New York will come from his time at the UVM Medical Center. “OneCare will still have my time and attention, and I don’t think that OneCare is going to feel any difference in this model,” he said.
Moore previously served as the CEO of the Vermont Care Organization, a management company designed to merge operations between OneCare and Community Health Accountable Care, a similar but smaller health reform company owned by Vermont’s federally qualified community health centers.
Moore stopped working as CEO of the Vermont Care Organization on May 19. Just a few days earlier, that organization’s board voted to rework its vision and priorities, without suspending operations formally.
Moore said running Adirondacks ACO offers him an opportunity to learn more about federally qualified community health centers. The chair of the Adirondacks ACO board is the CEO of Hudson Headwaters Health Network.
Such health centers “do the type of population health management and wellness and community-based care that we all are now trying to catch up to,” Moore said.
“I definitely want to still work with the (federally qualified community health centers) of Vermont,” he said. “Obviously they’ve got to conclude the same thing and feel like they’re ready to work with a bigger” health care system.
Moore said he would be managing about 50 staff members working between Adirondacks ACO and OneCare. The vast majority of those 50 people work for OneCare, he said, but could use their expertise to help Adirondacks ACO.
Moore said Adirondacks ACO, which has been planning for future growth, was faced with a choice between hiring its own CEO and its own team of about 40 people, or leveraging the expertise of the existing team at OneCare.
“I’m very excited about it,” Moore said. “I helped form (Adirondacks ACO) and really have grown to know the upstate New York region, and the things that they’re trying to do there are really similar.”
“I think I can help them do better and get there faster than they otherwise would have,” Moore said.
