Working to improve the provider experience: A top priority

Health care is changing rapidly as anyone who works in the industry knows well. To help keep up with the ever-changing marketplace, government regulations and increased scrutiny around health care spending, insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan are creating new plans, working with vendors on cost-saving programs and structuring networks that focus on high-quality care for our members.

This often causes changes to the way that we interact with our health care providers — changes that can increase administrative work and add new patient care requirements. We’ve heard your concerns loud and clear, and understand that these changes can cause confusion, extra work and overall disruption as you try to care for your patients.

We want to let you know that addressing your concerns is a top business priority for us. In upcoming articles and provider forums, we promise to:

• Provide more information about the rationale behind our quality and incentive programs and how they affect our provider relationships.
• Continue to bring you information about things like medical record reviews and new product designs, but also provide you with the context around them and be very clear about what we’re asking of our provider community.
• Streamline our processes, communicating clearly about the projects and networks that we’re developing, and providing an overview of the environment in which we’re making these changes.

We hope that doing these things will reduce confusion and needless work, allowing you to keep your focus where it belongs — on your patients. We can’t change the fact that the health care industry is becoming more complex, but we pledge to do our part to communicate clearly and reduce confusion wherever possible.