A home health provider and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) are teaming up to allow the home health care provider become the ACO’s preferred post-acute care provider.

The partnership aims to improve access to care for ACO patients and streamline coordination efforts.

Premier Patient Health Care (Premier PHC) and Encompass Home Health & Hospice (Encompass) say their new partnership will also manage the quality and cost of care for patients across multiple settings in order to meet quality benchmarks and improve patient outcomes.

Premier PHC serves over 20,000 Medicare patients in north Texas and south Oklahoma. Encompass serves as a preferred post-acute partner to Premier PHC, providing home health care, hospice care, care transitions, transitional care management, and care management. Encompass operates in 12 states nationwide.

“According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S. health expenditures are expected to reach approximately 20% of GDP by 2021,” says Anwar Kazi, COO of Patient Healthcare, in a news release.

Reducing the amount of time patients spend in higher cost settings, offering preventative strategies such as disease care management and providing enhanced care transitions coordination are ways the partnership will especially benefit high risk patients, the name new release says.

Written by Cassandra Dowell