Built into the DNA of SunCloud Health is a strong commitment to playing an integral role in the shift away from fee for service (quantity) and toward a clinical care and reimbursement model that is based on value (quality). We seek to be measured and held accountable for the quality that we provide our patients, their families and their payers and not just for the quantity of services that we provide. We believe this approach aligns the interests of all parties involved in our patient’s care and will lead to better outcomes at lower total costs.
As Michael Porter and Tom Lee state in their Harvard Business Review article titled, “The Strategy That Will Fix Healthcare”, “the strategic agenda for moving to a high-value health care delivery system has six components. They are interdependent and mutually reinforcing…”. SEE IMAGE BELOW, The Value Agenda. SunCloud is committed to being a high-value healthcare provider, and we implement this strategy every day in nearly everything we do.
Our integrated treatment approach is rooted in a care team that is intentionally designed around our patient’s conditions. We have been obsessively measuring, using and sharing outcomes since the day we opened our doors. We also have a robust IT platform that is centered around our patients and their conditions, and which puts them and their needs first. We are in pretty good shape with numbers 1, 2 and 6 in Porter and Lee’s chart above.
Adding beds enables us to more fully integrate care delivery across separate facilities (number 4) and move to bundled payments for (almost full) care cycles (number 3). We have three facilities that provide outpatient, intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization and our newest facility which provides residential level of care.
With these four sites all based throughout the Chicago area, we now offer the full continuum of care for mental health and addiction treatment, exclusive of inpatient level of care. Having beds enables us to accommodate people who come in needing our highest level of care and as importantly we can now support patients who need to “step up” from outpatient to RTC (24/7 support). In our world recovery is not always a straight line “up”. While not optimal, sometimes people get worse before they get better and most, as they get better, step down from one level of care to the next. As people go through the various stages of treatment with us, gone are the days when we needed to find other facilities that may not specialize in what our patients need when they needed more than what we could offer.
When our patients come to SunCloud Health today, we are able to serve them the same way with the same model and often with the same people, regardless of the level(s) of care they may need and regardless of whether their recovery journey is a straight line “up” or if there are “ups” and “downs” throughout the process.
This type of integration, we feel, greatly enhances the quality of care we are able to provide throughout our patient’s entire care episode. Patient satisfaction is also positively impacted as we can step up and down in a way that is nearly seamless to our patients. We are now thrilled to be in a position to participate in a true bundled payment system that is based on the value we provide, regardless of level(s) of care the patient may participate in. We can now more comfortably share in some of the risk of our patient’s care from the start of their care episode until the end. In other words, things just got a whole lot easier and better for our patients and our payers, and hopefully us as well!
With the addition of beds SunCloud has doubled down on our commitment to true value based care. We look forward to working with patients, their families and their payers to continue to play an integral role in the exciting transformation from quantity to quality (aka VALUE) in mental health and addiction treatment!