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The Purchaser Business Group on
Health (PBGH) for the first time has created a public purchaser advisory committee. The decision,
part of the purchaser group’s newly announced five-year plan, is meant to
align the needs of its public members and integrate them with private
purchasers. While the group’s members include major corporations such as
Apple, Inc., Microsoft Corp. and the Walt Disney Co., PBGH is different from
other purchasing organizations in that it also represents public purchasers,
according to Elizabeth Mitchell, PBGH’s chief president and chief executive
officer.
PBGH touts collective
action
- Mitchell tells
AIS Health that the launch of the public purchaser advisory committee
“really reflects our intention to partner across purchasers. Our members
say regularly, even our largest employers, that none of them are big
enough to do this alone. But collectively, between our public and
private members, we can change health care.”
- Still, Mitchell
notes that public purchasers are distinct in some ways from the large,
self-insured employers that comprise most of PBGH’s membership.
- “We are finding
places that we align,” Mitchell says. “I would say that public
purchasers often have a regulatory environment or constraints that may
be different, where our private purchasers are governed by ERISA [The
Employee Retirement Income Security Act] that gives them more
flexibility sometimes than some state or county purchasers. Sometimes
there are policy issues in different states that don’t exist for some of
our private members.”
CalPERS chief health
director to lead new committee
- Donald Moulds,
Ph.D., chief health director of the California Public Employees’
Retirement System (CalPERS), was named chair of the public purchaser
advisory committee.
- Moulds tells
AIS Health that public purchasers are alike in that they often engage
with state and federal government officials.
- “Those
interactions and those relationships [with officials] are particularly
important,” Moulds says. “Navigating that and understanding changes at
the federal level that may affect funding streams or the particularities
of a program are things that public sector purchasers will be
particularly attuned to and will share similarities in the need to
understand.”
Purchasers focus on
revamping primary care
- Even before the
launch of PBGH’s public purchaser advisory committee, CalPERS and
California agencies have worked together on changing health care in the
state, including talking about adopting similar quality metrics for
hospitals, providers and payers throughout California. Those California
entities are also focused on improving primary care, a goal that PBGH as
a whole shares.
- In January,
PBGH and the Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) launched the
Advanced Primary Care Measurement Pilot in California. CalPERS and
Covered California are working on that pilot with eBay and SFHSS. They
agreed to adopt the same measures in their contracts with health plans,
track outcomes from January 2022 to December 2022 and release the
results next year.
- In addition,
six payers this summer signed a
memorandum of understanding to become the first members of the
California Advanced Primary Care Initiative, a program sponsored by PBGH
and IHA that’s intended to expand the use of value-based primary care in
the state.
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