Annual Wellness Visits are key to staying up to date on patients’ medical conditions while improving quality of care, optimizing revenue, and closing gaps in care across populations. With the shift to value-based care, Annual Wellness Visits are also vital to reducing costs and hospital utilization.
How do they do this? It all comes down to patient engagement – with a robust Annual Wellness Visit strategy and completion rate, patients become more involved with their health and care plans, boosting results and outcomes in many different areas.
In this episode, we hear from Medical Advantage’s Annual Wellness Visit expert, Brandy Smuzeski, as she discusses her success helping an ACO achieve a 75% Annual Wellness Visit completion rate. She will also discuss strategies providers can use to leverage AWVs to generate revenue and maximize ACO reimbursement potential.
This is the first episode in our four-part patient engagement series, and the fifteenth episode in the Medical Advantage Podcast, where each we take time each episode to discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare, and the best practices your organization can take to stay productive and profitable. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
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Full Episode Transcript
Medical Advantage Podcast: Welcome to the Medical Advantage Podcast, where you can hear healthcare professionals, expert consultants, and industry thought leaders discuss the exciting new ideas and technologies that are changing the business of healthcare. Tune in to each episode as we hear from some of the most innovative minds in medicine about the future of healthcare and how your organization can stay profitable, efficient, and on top of industry best practices.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Medical Advantage podcast series. As always, I am your host, Celina Dusseau, and today’s episode marks the start of our four-part series highlighting patient engagement, what that term means, what it looks like and tools and tips providers can use to better engage with patients about their care.
We’re very excited to kick off this series with a topic that has a huge impact on patient engagement. Today we’ll be talking about annual wellness visits. Here with us to offer her insights is Brandy Smuzeski, a Licensed Master of Social Work and Medical Advantage’s own care manager and population health specialist. Brandy, thank you so much for joining us.
Brandy Smuzeski: Thanks Celina. Thanks for having me today.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: So as we get started, would you just like to kick us off by sharing a bit about yourself, your background, and the work that you do on a day-to-day basis?
Brandy Smuzeski: Sure. So as you’d mentioned, I’m a Licensed Master of Social Work and I work primarily with our PMC ACO. So our accountable care organization here at Medical Advantage. Also involved with our care management services with other clients too. So I’ve worked with our ACO for a little over four years now, and we’ve focused primarily around patient engagement and improving the care being provided to the patients, reducing costs. And one area we found more so than others of a great opportunity was annual wellness visits.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That is fantastic. Thank you Brandy. So with that, why don’t we get started into the main point of discussion today that you just lended to, annual wellness visits, and most of our listeners are probably somewhat familiar with annual wellness visits, but it might be beneficial hearing from you explain in your own words what they are and why are they so important.
Brandy Smuzeski: Absolutely. So annual wellness visits essentially refers to visits, and some people tend to get confused with three different types of visits that are being promoted by CMS. So with the annual wellness visit, they may refer to the initial preventative physical examination, and that visit would be one that would occur within 12 months of a patient enrolling into Medicare.
And then you have your two specific annual wellness visits. One is an initial, and the other one is a subsequent annual wellness visit. And with those two, those are the ones that we primarily have focused on within our accountable care organization because what they really focus on is preventative treatment.
They’re getting the patient engaged, they’re getting the patient more involved with their care, understanding their medical diseases, their diagnosis, and what needs to be done for those populations or those patients that are at greatest risk.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Great, that really starts to paint a really good picture and give some of those with less experience in this area a more complete understanding of what annual involvement, excuse me, annual wellness visits entail.
Now one of the things I wanted to talk to you today about was your recent success with the ACO that you mentioned in Flint, Michigan. I understand your team’s been working with the ACO to increase the number of annual wellness visits that have been performed, so I’m really interested to hear some more about this story.
How did this project get started? What strategies did you use to get people engaged, and what were some of the results that you started to see?
Brandy Smuzeski: Yeah, and I’m really glad that you asked because this is a huge focus that’s been for our ACO, the PMC ACO, and we have really focused on the opportunity of annual wellness visits just for not being completed.
So we have a great team of analytics who have been able to identify the data, identify the numbers of where the greatest opportunity was for us to focus. And then we created initiatives around that focus. So one of those areas that our analytics team has been able to identify of an area of opportunity is our annual wellness visits.
Our annual wellness visits were extremely low at the very beginning. And when we started realizing the opportunities that existed with completing annual wellness visits and all of the benefits that come along once you do get an annual wellness visit completed with a patient, even more so with those patients that are even more sick or have more diagnosis or those chronic conditions, they benefit even more so.
So when we were dealing with our demographic in Flint, Michigan, we noticed we tend to have a population that was more costly and sicker than the rest of the population outside in different demographics. So once we had identified annual wellness, being a great area of opportunity, we’re able to go from practices who were not even completing one annual wellness visit on their population to a practice that went all the way up to an 80% completion rate of annual wellness visits just within that one practice.
And for us, within the ACO as a whole, we were able to obtain a 75.5% completion rate for annual wellness visits. So the average within annual’s visit completion for practice is right around 20 to 24% nationally. So for us to achieve a 75.5% was really outstanding, and we’ve been really impressed with engagement that we’ve had from our practices that we work with, from the physicians, even more so with their patients, working with the physicians to be engaged to complete these annual wellness visits.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That’s fantastic. Brandy, I’m curious to know, were there any particular strategies or techniques that you found when starting out this project that made it really effective and let you see such fantastic results?
Brandy Smuzeski: Yeah, so when we first started, and I mentioned it was probably about four years ago when we identified these area of opportunity, it was reiteration and focusing on annual wellness visits.
We know that with an annual wellness visit being completed on a patient, it leads to a 5.7% cost reduction overall and that patient’s healthcare costs. So you have that benefit that was occurring and we were educating the practices and the physicians on these benefits.
You increase the patient’s engagement because now the patient is becoming in control of their health and their medical conditions. They’re working with that physician and creating that preventative plan and that treatment moving forward. So they are now more engaged in, its patient centered, so they’re in control.
They’re in that driver’s seat of what’s occurring, what’s going to occur moving forward, and what to expect. They’re being educated by the physicians because we’re educating the physicians. The other thing that we did internally, being able to go out to the practices and work one-on-one with the physicians and sit down and explain what all an annual wellness visit entailed.
At the beginning we heard a lot from the physicians saying, we don’t even know what an annual wellness visit is. We don’t even know other requirements. CMS makes all of these annual wellness visits and all of these other options out there so hard for us to even implement. We don’t even do it. We don’t have the time to research it and then to create all the documents that need to be done.
So we were able to identify where the practices were struggling and then meet the practices where they were at. So if it was the tools and the resources to complete it, we created an annual wellness visit packet for the practices, and we walked them through how to implement that and what type of process would work for each practice’s workflow.
We even had a care manager that went out to some of our practices that had felt like they had felt beneficial from having the care manager out there and they walked their staff as well as the physician through the beginning to the end of an annual wellness visit, and we blocked out a couple days for each practice, two to three days.
And went all the way through scheduled patients, seeing the patients with the physician there, and walked the practice through what that looked like. We even worked with EMRs, so another great service that Medical Advantage provides is a lot of work with the EHRs and we were able to create templates that really worked well with the practice and had a good process that was able to be implemented as they were going through the workflow of annual wellness visits.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That’s so incredible, not just efficient, but effective. It’s always so great to hear another success story of the awesome work that you and your team are doing to change the lives, not only of the practices, but also patients. So my follow-up question to that, I guess would be, would you say that annual wellness visits really do have a direct impact on delivering improved care for patients?
Brandy Smuzeski: They do. They really do. And even getting the engagement of the patients is one of the most beneficial at the forefronts because those patients are now working on a personalized plan of preventative services with the physician.
The physician sits down and they do a health risk assessment with that patient, and it’s almost where it’s going to file the cycle, the social history of that patient, and identifying so much more in depth than what a normal 10, 15, an hour, even 20 minute office call would allow. So it allows the physician and the patient to review those prior medical conditions, the current medical conditions, and create a plan going forward on how to best meet this patient’s need or needs.
So with that being said, the patient’s more engaged, the patient is more knowledgeable about their overall health, their medical conditions, and the physician is able to educate the patient on their medical conditions and moving forward, preventative options available, and then to place those orders for those patients on some of those preventative service as well.
So it really does. It’s a nice way to pull the patient in, get the patient engaged as well as create a plan for the patient, so that personalized preventative plan for the next five to 10 years to ensure the patient’s on track to a more healthy lifestyle, and it improves the care that’s being provided to the patients.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: It’s just outstanding. And of course, as we all know, increasing patient engagement is one of the strongest ways that providers cannot only offer better care, but also become more profitable at the same time. So I just wanna ask for anyone out there who’s listening, who wants to improve their own annual wellness visit metrics or get more out of their existing annual wellness visit strategy.
Is there a way for them to contact you or someone on your team? What other services does your team offer that might be able to help?
Brandy Smuzeski: Yes, absolutely. Feel free. They can always definitely reach out to me via email, would probably be the best. That way we assess what their needs are and then when it comes to services, Medical Advantage does offer a very wide range of services.
So care management services, which would include these annual wellness visits, and if there’s an an ACO or an accountable care organization out there looking for assistance or looking to hit some of these metrics to reduce their overall cost and improve the quality of care being provided to the patients, that’s another great area that Medical Advantage is able to provide those services to.
I mentioned briefly around the EHR, this is a great opportunity. If you’re struggling with your EHR and you don’t know how to do annual wellness visits because your EHR just isn’t compatible, and you don’t have that process or that workflow, usually what happens is we get involved with one service and then we’re able to assist a practice or a PO or a company with other services that we have to offer as well.
So it’s really almost limitless what we’re able to do. I would definitely say if you’re thinking or you’re interested or if there’s any area that you’re struggling with within healthcare and you’re just don’t have the answers and you’re curious if we’re capable of assisting, feel free to reach out. We can definitely do an assessment.
We can identify what we can do, whether it’s care management or even in another area within the healthcare field. I’m sure that we’d be able to put something together, and most of it is individualized. Most of what we’re able to offer for services is based on what the individual practice needs. So if it’s even something around transition of care, annual wellness visits, advanced care planning.
So when we started with our our annual wellness associates, we were able to identify even additional services that assisted our population with, and especially right now with what’s happened recently with a public health emergency, we have a lot of practices that were struggling financially and looking for other ways to generate revenue.
Annual wellness visits provided a great opportunity for generating additional revenue, and so the practice has really been happy with seeing that being beneficial too.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That is fantastic. Thank you so much for all of the information, Brandy, and for sharing a little bit more about the amazing work that you and your team do.
Before we wrap up for today, do you have any tips or last bits of advice for our listeners before we wrap things up?
Brandy Smuzeski: Yeah, I would definitely say, you know, annual wellness visits haven’t been around for many, many years, so just because something’s been around for many years and maybe it’s not having the popularity or the use that right off the bat, it may have or could have had. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not gonna be been an official long run.
You know, annual wellness visits have shown a reduction in cost for those patients by the 5.7% that have the annual wellness visits being implemented. But we know that a lot of practices, and we know that a lot of physicians struggle with getting the patient engaged in the first place to get the annual wellness completed and done.
So if you’re a practice that are struggling and you’re looking for, you know, a little bit more insight, feel free to reach out to us. That that is what we’re here for. Don’t give up. I know CMS has a lot of services out there that they are offering for patients and for practices and physicians to provide to their patients and it’s just a matter of establishing, you know, what process, what workflow works for you. And at the end of the day, if what you’re doing is to improve the quality of care that you’re providing to your patients, it will all work out.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Awesome. That’s incredible. Brandy, thank you so much. And this has been so informative and very relevant to the practices that we work with every single day.
So for our listeners seeking more information, I would really encourage you to find us on LinkedIn and Facebook or our website, medicaladvantage.com where you’ll find additional resources such as blogs, webinars, white papers, and so much more related to annual wellness, patient engagement and so much more.
And should you have any questions or we wish to speak with us in more detail, you can also reach us directly at info@medicaladvantage.com. Thank you again, Brandy, for your time today and to our audience, thank you always for listening. We’ll be back with the second installment of our patient engagement series very soon, where we’ll be discussing the importance of an effective practice website to keeping patients engaged.
Brandy, thank you so much again for your time and to our audience. See you next time.
Medical Advantage Podcast: Thanks for joining us this week on the Medical Advantage Podcast where we discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare and what they mean to your organization. For more information, visit us at medicaladvantage.com and make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, so you never miss a show.
