Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Partners with Cornerstone Health Care

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Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center announced that it has entered into a first-of-its-kind strategic affiliation agreement in the Triad with Cornerstone Health Care, P.A. through its management services organization Cornerstone Health Enablement Strategic Solutions (CHESS).

According to a release, the goal of the affiliation is to better position both partners for new models of health care delivery driven by health care reform. Both organizations describe the future as one that will emphasize value health care delivery and population management across diseases, such as managing large populations of patients with diabetes or heart failure using a variety of technologies. These future models could allow patients to access support services such as case management, home-based care, weight management and a variety of customized services to support groups of patients with specific diseases or shared characteristics.

The affiliation supports Wake Forest Baptist's mission to improve health throughout the region. John D. McConnell, M.D., chief executive officer of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, called the agreement a strategic partnership whose time had come and was driven by a shared vision of patient-centered care that goes beyond the normal boundaries of a hospital or doctor's office. "It is crucial in this challenging health care environment for multiple health care providers to join together and assume accountability for managing and improving health care," McConnell said. "Through better care coordination, we plan to provide more integrated care with fewer duplicated services, increased patient access to support services, and lower total health care costs."

Grace Terrell, M.D., chief executive officer for Cornerstone Health Care, said, "This is the first-of-its-kind Triad partnership between an academic medical center and an independent, multi- specialty provider group. Our joint goal is to enhance the quality of patient care while decreasing overall health care costs by leveraging each organization's strengths to accomplish these objectives."

By partnering through CHESS, Wake Forest Baptist and Cornerstone Health Care immediately expand their capabilities to engage in population management and advanced analytics, with the additional expertise of a research enterprise at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The synergies of these important elements will benefit a much larger group of patients, as well as create an accountable care organization (ACO) that will include high-performance networks (HPNs), clinical integration, research, IT applications, support services and case management.

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center is a fully integrated academic medical center located in Winston-Salem, N.C.