HealthPartners and Allina Health are forming a new cooperative arrangement to create financial incentives for healthier outcomes and lower costs for patients.
The new arrangement by the competing health care providers applies to roughly 150,000 people across the state who get care at Allina hospitals and clinics but have HealthPartners as their insurer.
The arrangement provides Allina financial incentives to do things such as cut down on hospital admissions or readmissions through routine and preventive care, sharing of electronic health information, and better screening for social determinants of health.
The five-year partnership continues a trend of "accountable care" and "value-based" relationships among organizations that traditionally compete or work at arm's-length. Rather than pay a fee for each service, accountable care groups set up financial incentives for better patient outcomes and more efficient operations.
Allina Health, based in Minneapolis, is a health care provider with 11 hospitals and more than 100 clinics and pharmacies. HealthPartners, in Bloomington, is both a payer and provider that operates a health plan with 1.8 million medical and dental members nationwide, and runs a network of nine hospitals and more than 300 clinics. Both organizations are not-for-profits with locations in Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
Though they compete for patient revenue as traditional fee-for-service health systems, Allina and HealthPartners have also worked collaboratively for years.
The arrangement announced this week follows what the organizations said is a successful private accountable care organization, or ACO, called the Northwest Metro Alliance.
Since its founding in 2010, the alliance has seen $40 million less in patient-care expenses than it otherwise would have, by coordinating care among five Allina clinics, four HealthPartners clinics, the Mercy Hospital campuses in Coon Rapids and Fridley, and the jointly run RiverWay Pain Clinic.
