Dr. Gottlieb and Governor Patrick spoke at MIT’s health care symposium.

At Partners HealthCare, we are continually working to find new ways to provide our patients with the high quality care they expect, and to further the conversation about what we can do to lead the way as Massachusetts works to address the affordability of health care.

This past week, industry leaders, government officials and members of the academic community came together for the MIT Sloan Health Care Symposium. The theme of the symposium, “Collaborating to Control Costs and Deliver Quality: The Role of Organization Design and Capabilities in Health Care Policy,” speaks to the importance of working together—hospitals, insurers, officials—to find solutions to the challenges that we face.

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At Partners HealthCare we’re committed to improving both patient care and affordability. On our site, we’ve often addressed the importance of coordinated care. Case managers are vital to that coordination in helping patients navigate the health care system. In this firsthand account, you will read how a case manager at Partners HealthCare, Anna, made a difference for one local family.

By Lee Laughlin

My mother’s health has been described as a house of cards. She’s older and much to her frustration, her health is failing. She’s a three-time cancer survivor and she still lives alone. Her medical care is delivered via a senior health practice affiliated with a prestigious hospital. Reputations be damned, good medical care comes down to good people caring about what they do.

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Today’s Boston Globe reported that state regulators approved health insurance rates that will hold increases to an average of just 1.2 percent.

In response to the news, the State House New Service quoted Governor Patrick stating, “The market is moving in the right direction and that is really good.”

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In 2012, one of the toughest challenges in these difficult economic times is how to control health care costs. And while providers, insurers, government officials and patients alike continue to monitor the marketplace with varying levels of optimism and concern, we at Partners HealthCare view this challenge as a tremendous opportunity to explore fundamental changes in the way we deliver care.

You may recall back in December we announced that Partners HealthCare had been selected as one of five organizations in Massachusetts (and one of 32 nationwide) to participate in the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) program. The Pioneer ACO is an innovative model of care that focuses on enhanced coordination as the means to provide patients with high quality, cost-effective care. Piloted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center, this program emphasizes efficiency by providing hospital systems with an overall budget to care for their patients, rather than a payment for each test or treatment.

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Earlier this week, an editorial in the Boston Globe highlighted a number of encouraging developments in health care that demonstrate how the market is working on its own to control costs. Given these advances, the Globe recommended taking a “wait-and-see” approach to additional regulation.

At Partners HealthCare, we agree that the market is working, and we continue to support and promote new methods of care and accountability in improving patient outcomes while we address affordability.

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Last week in Washington DC, I had the opportunity to join my colleagues from some of the nation’s leading hospitals as part of the Healthier Hospitals Initiative (HHI), a coalition of 11 of the country’s most progressive health systems, including Partners HealthCare, Kaiser Permanente, Dignity Health (formerly Catholic Healthcare West) and Hospital Corporation of America.

HHI announced its goal to recruit 2,000 hospitals to join with Partners HealthCare and other sponsoring systems to reduce the environmental footprint of health care. Together, we identified six challenges

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This morning, The Boston Globe and Boston Herald both addressed a new proposal drafted by Attorney General Martha Coakley that, as the Globe described, would “regulate hospitals and doctors and the prices they are paid to care for patients.” In fact, the editorial page of the Boston Herald stated that this proposal is “an unprecedented level of government intrusion in the employer-insurer-provider relationship.”

We agree with this assessment, and we think this approach ignores what is actually taking place in the marketplace and threatens to stifle the many innovations that providers, insurers and businesses are putting into place to control health care costs. In just the past year, Partners, along with other providers and insurers alike, have moved at lightning speed to address the cost issue.

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An article in the Boston Globe offers an informative view on the important but changing role of the primary care physician in the doctor-patient relationship. The article references efforts already underway at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and points to Partners HealthCare’s adoption of a team-based approach to patient care as a catalyst for physicians’ increased ability to accept new patients while providing more efficient and affordable care.

“The shift is an example of how widespread efforts to control medical costs and improve the coordination and quality of care are trickling down to individual doctors and their patients,” the Globe’s Liz Kowalczyk writes.

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Here on Connect with Partners, we often discuss the various efforts that Partners HealthCare and the rest of the marketplace are making to help slow the growth in health care costs. Today, Martha Bebinger of WBUR conducted a wide-ranging and insightful conversation with four of the region’s leading health care experts in an attempt to take stock of how the market is doing. The piece – “As Health Costs Rise More Slowly, How Low Can We Go?” – weighs the various innovations taking place in the Massachusetts marketplace and their impact on health costs over the long term.

Stuart Altman, a Brandeis University professor and nationally known health care expert, pointed in particular to some of the efforts underway at Partners. Altman states, “Partners has done some amazing things to lower costs.”

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Here on Connect with Partners, we often highlight how the health care marketplace is working to address rising costs. In last night’s State of the State address (read the full transcript here), Governor Deval Patrick applauded these efforts, declaring, “The market is moving in the right direction and that’s very good news.”

To emphasize this point, the Governor highlighted the reopening of contracts by hospitals and insurers to accept lower rates, evidenced by Partners HealthCare’s new contracts with Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Tufts Health Plan. Today’s Boston Globe provides further evidence supporting the Governor’s stance, as Children’s Hospital Boston and Blue Cross Blue Shield just announced a similar agreement to curb health care costs.

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