Hello from Our New Executive Medical Director

Hello from Our New Executive Medical Director

Dear Colleagues,
As the newest member of the AHP team, please allow me the privilege of introducing myself to those who I have not had the chance to meet yet. My name is Chad Teeters, and I am the new executive Medical Director for AHP. Many of you may know me best from my prior and continued role as a cardiologist at the U of R with our Highland Cardiology team. Having just come on board in early December, it has been quite the whirlwind catching up to speed on all the amazing progress AHP has made in its initial five years. It is truly an honor to be given this opportunity, and I am acutely aware of the great responsibility to help advance our collective cause in the pursuit of the quadruple aim: better patient experience, improved population health, reduced cost and better provider satisfaction.
We are in a time of great transition within our nation, the health care enterprise as a whole, and certainly within AHP and our individual practices. Within AHP much of early focus has been on recruiting new member providers and contracting with payers to incentivize providers for the quality they deliver. AHP has had unprecedented success as an accountable care network, and now as we look towards the next five years, we have a new strategic plan for the enterprise and new challenges to face. Considering the quality of both the team assembled at AHP and our network of providers, I have every confidence we will meet these challenges and continue to excel in our endeavors.
As with any change, there will be stumbles and strain as we evolve in this new health care environment, but my commitment is to try to help foresee these issues and mitigate the effects on our organization and members to allow for the most streamlined progress. Fortunately, I am joining a team of Medical Directors at AHP whom you have already gotten to know and who have been doing truly amazing work at helping to identify ways we can transform care delivery to our population. Our team will continue to work seamlessly to advance this agenda, and perhaps the best example of this is the portfolio of Integrated Practice Committees (IPCs) that we are announcing in this newsletter. This portfolio is a culmination of work of the Medical Directors, others within the AHP staff, and many of you who direct or advise these IPC committees. Our goal is to have these committees set the tone for our population health initiatives and hopefully bring greater health improvement to our patients while realizing greater shared savings for our network. We look forward to your feedback and assistance in developing these initiatives, and we commit to provide ongoing feedback on our progress and outcomes. Our upcoming and redesigned newsletter will serve as the conduit for much of these updates and progress reports, and we hope you will find this new look exciting and informative.
In closing, let me emphasize that my goal is to be as available, responsive and Accountable to you all as I can be. I hope that communication can and will be a two-way street with our members informing our direction as much as us reporting our goals and progress. I look forward to working with you all, and encourage each of you to get involved in AHP committees and to provide feedback either directly, through your care managers, or to our provider liaisons so that we can be as nimble and thoughtful in our approach as possible.

With great appreciation,
J. Chad Teeters, MD