Christine Bernsten on Health Share of Oregon's Successes and Challenges

Cooperation and trust are key in getting partners to work well together as part of a coordinated care organization (CCO), said Christine Bernsten, senior manager of delivery systems transformation for Health Share of Oregon.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Health Share has 16 different plan partners with individual contracts. How do you coordinate all of those entities?

So there are 16 different plan partners that are part of Health Share and many, many more provider organizations, so it’s a lot of different people to come together trying to achieve common goals. And it was challenging in the beginning, a lot of the initial focus was on creating relationships, identifying easy opportunities to reduce administrative burden, make things easier for providers and patients as well.

And I think we’ve been successful over time by choosing small things to work on, showing success, and that develops trust among the partners and makes you want to take on bigger projects, bigger opportunities for integration, and continue to refine your relationships working together.

What challenges did Health Share of Oregon face in the beginning?

So one of the biggest challenges is provider buy-in, and just getting a lot of different organizations to work together and agree on what the goals are, agree on how we’re going to approach those together, and really develop that trust and have some positive successes together. But I think people were skeptical in the beginning and CCOs have started to show places where they really can bring value to serving the Medicaid population and so people are more willing to continue working together.