Oregon

The CCO’s goal was to reduce the number of “million-dollar babies born to drug-using women with mental health issues,” said Shelly Uhrig of Options for Southern Oregon.

Now the CCO will sustain that financing – and start screening earlier at well-woman visits. “Waiting until a woman is pregnant is too late,” Johnstun told the 2015 CCO Summit.

Josephine County has a 58 percent rate of unintended pregnancies, higher than the national average. Now all women – not just the Medicaid population -- receive screening and care.

They’re known as the “undoctored” — the 9,000 Oregon Health Plan patients in Lane County who don’t have a primary care doctor.

They are adrift without doctors because Medicaid rolls in Lane County have surged to more than 96,000 people at the same time the county suffers from a shortage of primary care providers.

Oregon’s Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs) are a type of accountable care organization (ACO); these multi-sector partnerships accept upside and downside risk for both health care costs and quality metrics. And yet CCOs deviate from the traditional accountable care model. Unlike most ACOs, CCOs were created by state regulation, are geographically defined, and are accountable for the Medicaid population, a group of individuals at high risk for psychosocial challenges that impact health outcomes.

A recently concluded demonstration project made meaningful progress toward introducing a "patient-centered medical home" approach at "safety net" practices serving vulnerable and underserved populations. Lessons learned in the course of developing and implementing the Safety Net Medical Home Initiative (SNMHI) are featured in a special November supplement to Medical Care.

You know the painstaking chore of taking your child to the doctor, or even just making it there yourself? Your days are already filled with spreadsheets and spilled coffee, muddy paw prints and picking up kids from soccer practice. Doctors’ offices are often closed on the weekends, and who has time to make it during lunch or pull the kids out of school?

Of course after the visit, while speeding off to your next appointment across the city, don’t forget to stop at the pharmacy for cold medicine and lozenges before you head back to work.

The CMS and Oregon are stepping back from an apparent clash over how the state is paying the managed-care organizations serving Medicaid beneficiaries in its nationally watched Medicaid demonstration. State officials and leaders of Oregon's coordinated-care organizations had expressed strong concern that the CMS was limiting their flexibility in providing services to keep patients healthy.

More than 340,000 new people have joined the Oregon Health Plan since January, and a new report says it's a system that has shown major improvement in the past year. The state tracked what coordinated care organizations (CCOs) are doing for Oregon Health Plan or Medicaid patients. It found that the number of outpatient primary-care visits increased by 11 percent in 2013, an indication that more people are getting care sooner and not at emergency rooms.