October 27, 2016
(Helena, Mont.) – Mountain-Pacific Quality Health was recently awarded a contract to improve rural/frontier health care transitions in the states of Montana and Wyoming.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will fund this special innovation project (SIP), called the Rural/Frontier Care Transition – Project ECHO®. The Project ECHO® (Extension of Community Healthcare Outcomes) model uses online meeting technology to connect health care providers in rural communities with an inter-professional team of regional care coordination experts.
“Mountain-Pacific is committed to improving health care in the regions we serve,” said Sara Medley, Mountain-Pacific’s CEO. “This initiative not only ties into our goal to improve care and care coordination in Montana and Wyoming, but in partnership with the University of Wyoming it will also support health care providers in some of our most remote communities so they can better meet their patients’ needs.”
The Project ECHO® model has been used in multiple states and countries to provide best practice care for chronic, common and complex diseases in rural and underserved areas and to monitor health care outcomes. Mountain-Pacific will recruit providers who will focus on Medicare populations, especially those beneficiaries with multiple complex chronic conditions, multiple medications, behavioral health issues, socioeconomic issues and dually-enrolled beneficiaries in both Medicare and Medicaid.
Mountain-Pacific will partner with the University of Wyoming for this project. The University of Wyoming Institute for Disabilities (UW WIND) has been designated by the University of New Mexico ECHO Institute as a Project ECHO® Superhub, one of just four in the world. Other project partners will include the Wyoming Center on Aging (WyCOA), Wyoming and Montana’s state hospital associations and the states’ Hospital Improvement and Innovation Networks (HIINs).
About Mountain-Pacific—Mountain-Pacific is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and holds federal and state contracts that allow them to oversee the quality of care for Medicare and Medicaid members. Mountain-Pacific works within its region (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific Territories of Guam and American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) to help improve the delivery of health care and the systems that provide it. Mountain-Pacific’s goal is to increase access to high-quality health care that is affordable, safe and of value to the patients they serve.
www.mpqhf.org