Legacy Health Partners - News & Updates

Delivering value and improving health

Advancing our Vision in 2024

By Albert Chaffin, MD
Medical Director, Legacy Health Partners

Since LHP was founded in 2015, our collective vision has included innovations in healthcare delivery, strengthened collaborations among providers, and continued commitment to improving the health and well-being of our patient population. I want to express my deepest gratitude to each member of our network for their dedication, hard work, and unwavering commitment to our shared mission. Together, we’ve achieved remarkable milestones, and I am confident that the coming year holds even greater promise for Legacy Health Partners.

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare, embracing technology, sharing innovative ideas, and ensuring our providers are up to date on the latest treatment guidelines is key to providing high-quality patient care. Over the past year, Legacy Health Partners has made significant strides in all these areas, and we plan to use that momentum into 2024 to guide the network’s continuous improvement.

Strengthening our Network

This year I will be visiting several LHP practices alongside members of Legacy’s Population Health Quality Performance & Improvement team to engage staff and clinic leadership in quality improvement projects, assistance with medical home attestation, and general best practice knowledge sharing. These meetings will be strategized to first serve practices who need assistance with submitting data to help meet LHP’s quality performance metrics.

We will also be encouraging practices to sign up for programs that allow for streamlined data submission with different insurance payors, which will alleviate busy work that staff find themselves consumed with during the last and first quarters of the new year. And all of this will be presented in a way that practices can apply the workflows and strategies to all their patient populations, not just LHP covered lives. I also look forward to delivering quality awards to last year’s winners over the next few weeks to celebrate with providers and staff and recognize the difference their projects made for patients. Through our interactions we will introduce ways that LHP practices can share kudos for fellow practices when they want to recognize innovative work. This will help strengthen the network by sharing our best work with each other!

Clinical Collaboration Kickoff

Continuing best practice education is paramount for a clinically integrated network to be successful and well respected. Last year we hosted two clinical collaboration talks about surgical/procedural cost savings and ways for providers to mitigate the effects of wildfire smoke on lung, heart, and other chronic diseases. This year we will kick off the series with a talk geared towards any provider who manages depression and anxiety in their practice. With limited access to psychiatrists and mental health NPs, primary care providers are left holding the bag with clinically resistant depression and anxiety cases. We aim to give primary care providers the tools to reassess the diagnoses and treatment plan of those patients while they wait to get in with a prescribing mental health provider.

Legacy + OHSU Combination

While we make steady progress towards reaching a definitive agreement to create a high-quality, integrated public health system in early 2024, LHP is moving forward with the mindset of “business as usual”. As you may know, reaching a definitive agreement is a complex process that requires careful planning and collaboration, and our objective is to be as thoughtful as possible as we consider the best ways to bring Legacy and OHSU together.

I acknowledge the uncertainty you may feel regarding this change and will continue to share updates on our plans to unite our organizations, as well as leverage the amazing clinically integrated network we have created over nearly 10 years together.

Quality Corner: Cervical Health Awareness Month

January is Cervical Health Awareness Month. LHP recently compiled a cervical cancer screening toolkit to help providers succeed in this measure and improve the health of their patients. The toolkit covers how to address common barriers to screening, workflow suggestions for optimizing patient reminders and scheduling, and common billing codes accepted to ensure your coding practices satisfy the measure. We also acknowledge a history of trauma can impact a patient’s decision to delay or refuse cervical screening and can affect pap screening experiences. Applying a trauma-informed approach to cervical cancer screening may help address barriers among women who avoid, delay, or refuse the exam.

As a member of the LHP network, you have access to many resources on the LHP Team Site that help support measures, workflows, and patient outreach and education. We continue to create new materials all the time, so check back often! You can also view this month’s specialty spotlight of women's health clinics in the LHP network, so you know where to refer patients if you are not performing Pap and HPV testing.

Specialty Spotlight: Women's Healthcare

The World Health Organization (WHO) has a plan for the elimination of cervical cancer through vaccination and screening—we can get there! If you are looking for a women’s healthcare practice to help with yearly screening for your LHP patients for Pap testing and HPV, please see the practices below.

In Oregon:

In Washington:

Welcome new Board and Committee members

Join us in welcoming seven new members to LHP’s governance structure. The LHP Board and each committee is responsible for a specific segment of LHP operations, planning, and development. Each member brings a unique and valuable perspective to developing and growing our clinically integrated network.

Board of Managers

Kevin O’Boyle, MHSA – Administrator
Robert Fu, DO – Internal Medicine
Kelley Pratt, MD – Emergency Medicine

Clinical Collaboration & Performance Improvement Committee

Jane Ware, MD – Internal Medicine
Heather Zarour, MD – General Surgery

Finance & Contracting Committee

Richelle Neal, MD – Pediatrics
George Lin, MD – Emergency Medicine

You can meet all our Board and Committee members on our website.

Caught in Crisis: Advanced Psychiatric Management for Frontline Providers

A huge demand for behavioral health services and a severe lack of psychiatric specialists is producing a persistent need for frontline providers to manage psychiatric care. Geriatric to pediatric patients experiencing anxiety and depression are increasingly looking to their primary care providers for treatment.

Legacy Health Partners presents its next clinical collaboration event focused on going beyond the basics, with guidance for both adult and pediatric frontline providers who have exhausted other treatment strategies when caring for patients with ongoing mental health needs.

Presenters:

James Koved, MD (adults) – Adult psychiatrist; assistant professor of psychiatry, OHSU; co-medical director of Psychiatric Emergency Services, Unity Center for Behavioral Health

Joe Thoits, MD (pediatrics) – Child and adolescent and adult psychiatrist; assistant professor of psychiatry, OHSU; medical director of Child and Adolescent Inpatient Psychiatric Unit, Unity

When: Tuesday, February 27, 2024, 6–7:30 pm
Where: Lorenzen Conference Center at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center
Cost: Free with a delicious Lebanese and Mediterranean dinner, catered by Nicholas Restaurant. Hosted bar with beer, wine, and non-alcoholic beverages also included.

More details about this event, including learning objectives, are available on this flyer.

Announcements, deadlines, and reminders

Adult primary care practices: Submit supplemental clinical data to maximize your performance for certain 2023 measures that are not captured through claims data but are recorded in a patient’s electronic health record (EHR). The deadline to submit data securely to LegacyHealthPartners@lhs.org is March 1. If you have questions about completing this process, please talk with your outreach adviser.

Practice administrators: Review the attestation report in Power BI to verify that completions for 2023 practice and provider measures/activities are accurate. If you find anything is missing or captured incorrectly, submit an appeal request form by March 8.

In case you missed it:

Metropolitan Pediatrics was selected as the winner of the 2023 LHP Quality Awards. Read the story from December for a summary of last year’s quality projects and how we are recognizing our finalists.

View the 2024 clinical integration handbook on the LHP team site for information about this year’s performance measures, requirements and expectations to succeed as a clinically integrated network. Changes include updating the colorectal cancer screening age range to 45-75 to align with USPSTF guidelines and CMS expectations for 2024 service dates. LHP also retired three measures: Asthma medication ratio, Diabetes care: medical attention for nephropathy, and VTE Prophylaxis.

Have you had a positive experience with another LHP member or want to recognize someone on your staff who goes the extra mile day-to-day? Submit some kudos below. When praise and achievements are submitted, they will be featured in LHP communications for network recognition and celebration.

Submit your kudos

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