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BATON ROUGE – Primary care doctors in Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana’s Quality Blue program are getting better health results for their patients who have chronic conditions.
Blue Cross announced its 2018 Quality Blue program results at the annual Statewide Learning Collaborative today, at the Hilton Capitol Center in Baton Rouge.
“We started the Quality Blue program to closely partner with healthcare providers around the state, support them in treating their patients and share information with them that helps coordinate care, close gaps and, overall, boost health outcomes,” said Vindell Washington, M.D., Blue Cross chief medical officer. “The results show it’s working. We’re stronger together in improving the health of our shared customers—their patients, our members.”
Quality Blue program data through September 2018 show more enrolled primary care doctors are getting their patients at goal for the chronic conditions targeted in Quality Blue. Since the first full year of the program (2013-2014) through today, there has been:
Blue Cross establishes the clinical quality measures for each condition to track health improvement over time. For example, the doctors are tracked to see how many of their patients have blood pressure or blood sugar readings in a healthy range, are taking medication as directed, or are not smoking.
At the collaborative, nearly 400 individual primary care doctors from all regions of Louisiana were recognized as Top Performers in treating each of these conditions. This included 387 doctors who received Top Performer awards in hypertension, who were jointly recognized by Blue Cross and the World Hypertension League.
Four clinics in the Greater New Orleans area earned the highest scores on Quality Blue’s clinical quality measures for treating patients with the targeted chronic conditions:
And, for the third year in a row, The Family Doctors (Shreveport) earned Highest Overall Performance, as the clinic with the highest average score on the program’s clinical quality and efficiency measures. Efficiency measures track how well a practice is keeping costs in line by prescribing generic drugs, helping patients avoid ER visits for non-emergency situations, and using imaging tests to treat lower back pain only when medically necessary.
At the collaborative, Blue Cross and the Louisiana Colorectal Cancer Roundtable presented special recognitions to 25 Quality Blue doctors who got 80% or more of their eligible patients screened for colorectal cancer in the past year.
For more information about Quality Blue, visit www.bcbsla.com/QBPC.
NOTE FOR BROADCAST MEDIA: A video news release of this event and b-roll footage are available through Hometown Productions.
About Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is committed to our mission to improve the health and lives of Louisianians. We invest both time and money in the communities we serve, supporting the health and wellbeing of Louisianians through more than 200 charitable organizations.
With our subsidiaries, HMO Louisiana and Southern National Life, we provide group and individual health insurance plans, life and disability insurance, group voluntary products and administrative services to one out of four Louisiana residents. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana also provides Medicare supplement and Medicare Advantage plans and is a partner in offering the Healthy Blue Medicaid Managed care plan. Louisiana is the only state where we operate, with offices in every major region to serve our customers.
Founded in New Orleans in 1934, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is a tax-paying non-profit health insurer. We are a private mutual company, owned by our policyholders, with an independent Louisiana Board of Directors and no shareholders. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.
