Brown & Toland Physicians Continues to Improve Quality and Lower Costs Through Cigna Collaborative Care Program

Brown & Toland Physicians has produced excellent second-year results in affordability with a market-leading medical cost trend that was 5.4 percent lower than the local San Francisco Bay Area market. Cigna’s (NYSE:CI) collaborative care initiative with Brown & Toland Physicians confirms that the program continues to make progress toward achieving the goals of improved health, affordability and patient experience in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cigna Collaborative Care is the company’s approach to accomplishing the same population health goals as accountable care organizations, or ACOs. Through this collaboration between Cigna and Brown & Toland, participating Brown & Toland physicians delivered cost effective, quality care to more than 12,000 customers covered by a Cigna PPO health plan.

Since 2012, Cigna has provided Brown & Toland with customized reports detailing cost, efficiency and quality performance as guidance for the care provided to its Cigna customers. These reports help to assess trends and cost outliers, and identify opportunities for cost enhancement and improving care.

Brown & Toland’s performance also resulted in a reduction of facility inpatient costs, down 3 percent, and a reduction of facility outpatient costs, down 6 percent. Additionally, Brown & Toland reduced their professional costs by 1 percent while maintaining quality patient care.

“Brown & Toland’s high-quality, cost-efficient network of independent physicians, coupled with Cigna’s experienced collaborative care team, were the keys to the success of this collaboration,” said Andrew Snyder, M.D., Brown & Toland’s chief medical officer. “For this commercial ACO population the focus was to ensure that patients received the right care in the right setting. Our outpatient success was a result of our strong partnerships with ancillary facilities as well as our providers’ commitment to decrease avoidable emergency room visits by providing easy access to primary care services. Customers in the inpatient setting had the benefit of working directly with our nurse care managers and care coordinators to make sure they received the support they needed, both in the hospital and after discharge.”