PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Turn-Key Health, an Advanced Illness Management (AIM) company, today unveils Palliative Illness ManagementTM – PIMTM: a solution designed for healthcare payers and at-risk provider organizations serving seniors. Deploying community-based palliative care teams complemented by predictive analytics, and identifying individuals earlier in the disease trajectory, PIM™ offers a platform to support patient and family caregiver engagement.
“The first-to-market offering of its kind nationwide, PIM™ integrates specialized advanced illness assessments and services in conjunction with supporting medical resources, executing on a strategy that is holistic, data-driven and evidence-based,” says Greer Myers, president, Turn-Key Health. “Individuals with advanced illness who might otherwise go undetected by traditional means are identified earlier in the progression of disease, ensuring that gaps in care are recognized and closed. For payer-driven population health programs, this approach has a positive, significant impact on the overall economic healthcare burden, mitigating patient and caregiver financial consequences and improving member/patient satisfaction.”
PIM™ introduces a new, unique option that successfully tackles the impact of a senior population projected to grow by 135 percent by 2050, the likelihood that many will experience some form of serious, life-limiting illness, and a pattern of intense spending and over-medicalization of an aging society.
Through affiliations and partnerships with community-based palliative care teams and organizations across the country, PIM™ taps into the expertise and synergies of existing resources that advance the best quality of life for patients and their family caregivers. This specialized approach, with niche capabilities and expertise for conducting progressive and difficult conversations around quality of life in the remaining months of life, avoids costly, inappropriate interventions and care that is fragmented, uncoordinated or inadequate to meet the patient’s growing needs and personal wishes.
“Individuals often suffer through unnecessary, costly and even harmful treatments, despite overriding expert opinion that when patients have a terminal illness and the outlook for recovery dims, more treatment does not equal better care,” he adds. “The financial and social consequences extend to family caregivers who spend nearly 66 hours a week providing care to a loved one during the person’s last year of life. This erodes earning potential and imposes a profound economic toll.”
Medicare beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions are the heaviest users of healthcare services, with management of multiple diseases and disabilities placing a significant strain on health systems and health plan/payer resources. Approximately 35 percent of the Medicare fee-for-service spend occurs in the last year of life, and one out of every four Medicare dollars – over $125 billion – is spent on care near the end-of-life.
“As payers shift from fee-for-service to value-based payment models, PIM™ emerges as an important element of a population health management (PHM) approach, offering a methodical, scalable program with structured and consistent processes that stands alone or plugs into current PHM initiatives,” says Myers.
The PIM™ model effectively shifts the center of care to the home or community, placing the focus on care coordination and patient-centric services. It generates outcomes and results that are measured and valued at a population level. By optimizing pre-and post-acute care, it’s an approach that reduces hospitalizations, re-admissions and number of ICU days, resulting in a drop in the average claims cost per member per month.
“For payers, PIM™ facilitates rapid market entry, introducing a distinct approach that overcomes some of the most critical and costliest challenges facing the U.S. healthcare system today,” he concludes.
About Turn-Key Health
Turn-Key Health, an affiliate of Enclara Pharmacia, is an Advanced Illness Management (AIM) company for healthcare payers and at-risk provider organizations serving seniors. Its Palliative Illness Management™ (PIM™) model introduces a new option to improve care quality, address costs and reduce burdens associated with life-limiting illnesses. Visit http://www.turn-keyhealth.com.
