Insurance Delivered

Blue Cross Launches Home Programs

Source: Dallas Morning News

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas announced Feb. 1 its plans to launch a program to emphasize wellness and manage diseases a new “model of life” health insurance initiative aimed at streamlining patient care.

The insurer has created a so-called medical home program with two physician groups, Medical Clinic of North Texas and Village Health Partners, which provide care for more than 20,000 members in Dallas, Denton, Tarrant, Collin and Johnson counties.

The term medical home refers to a coordinated system of primary care physicians, specialists and pharmacists sharing a patient’s information electronically. Today, the health care system in Texas and the nation is mostly fragmented. Patients with chronic conditions often are treated for each medical symptom rather than managing the underlying disease, such as diabetes.

“The medical home is really the new model of care for the 21st century,” said Dr. Christopher Crow, president of Village Health Partners. “It combines the traditional hands-on approach that family medicine has always been known for with the latest technology to ensure patients receive the right care at the right time in the right setting.”

Eduardo Sanchez, vice president and chief medical officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, said the company’s effort to improve health requires a partnership with physicians, which he called the “quarterback guiding patients through the complex health care system.”

Healthcare on the road?
The new medical “home” program should make it easier for patients with chronic illnesses to feel more confident about travelling.  Often, once a passenger makes his or her way through the walk through metal detector and heads out of town, they also leave their medical history far behind.  Now, through this new network of physicians and primary care providers, patients with ongoing illnesses can avoid the emergency rooms when they are ill on he road and instead save that money for cheap airfare, or perhaps some designer perfume from the duty free shop.

Blue Cross is not the first health insurer to propose such a program. In August, Cigna HealthCare announced the state’s first commercially sponsored medical home program with Medical Clinic of North Texas to serve 10,000 patients. An estimated 10 percent of those patients have chronic conditions and have a higher risk of being admitted to an emergency room, Cigna said.

Although insurers are just embracing the medical home concept, hospitals and physicians long have pushed for medical homes. Children’s Medical Center in Dallas invested $2 million to start Physicians for Children as a nonprofit medical-home clinic system in August 2000.

Before the medical home program started, the 75220 ZIP code near Bachman Lake was Children’s largest source of minor visits to the hospital’s emergency room. But after the medical home clinic opened at Bachman Lake, minor emergency room visits from that ZIP code dropped to sixth among Children’s coverage zones.

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My Take: I’m all for a new system that will allow people to avoid putting more pressure on the already overcrowded emergency rooms at our country’s hospitals.  There simply aren’t enough volunteer programs or paid opportunities in the ERs here in America to keep up with the demand caused by the fact that so many of the country’s uninsured, including traveling passengers in and out of the country, rely on them to take care of illnesses that could and should be treated in a doctor’s office.

Speaking of traveling, if you are not a sufferer of any chronic illness and you have all your health insurance related issues sorted out, you might want to think about a vacation doing volunteer conservation work.  This is a great way to get to see a part of a foreign country you’ve always wanted to see while being of service to the locals.  There are often help wanted signs or ads for these kinds of jobs online.  They just take a lot sorting through to narrow down details about locations and costs to you, along with the work involved.

Usually, these kinds of working vacations do require you to have health insurance, but often they include some form of discount airfare, which can compensate for the long lines in customs and security checks where you and your belongings are heavily scrutinized by the latest metal detection equipment and TSA workers.

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Gift Giving

Traveling to see a loved one?  There’s all kinds of interesting gifts to buy in airports while you wait for your flight.  Everything from brass bells and stuffed animals to discount perfumes and faux designer purses, jewelry and clothing can be purchased in the shops in most airports around the country and abroad.