Privia Medical Group Gulf Coast has teamed up with Iron Health, a virtual care partner, to launch a new ancillary offering for its OBGYNs.
Dubbed Privia Wellness, the program provides services for women from weight management and hormone replacement therapy to nutraceuticals and sleep and brain health. The medical group’s goal is to embrace new models of care to help ensure their patients get access to much-needed services. The program launched mid-October.
Privia Medical Group Gulf Coast, part of Privia Health, is a multi-specialty medical group established in 2016. It currently has more than 400 providers across 135 clinics in the region, reaching more than 1 million patients annually in value-based contracts.
“You want to provide the best care that’s most accessible and the most affordable,” Mark Cone, M.D., market president at Privia Health, told Fierce Healthcare.
The partnership will initially launch at one of the group’s largest sites with OBGYNs with the goal of expanding to other markets around the country, executives told Fierce Healthcare.
The partnership was built on recent research showing most women use their OBGYN for all their healthcare needs.
“Many women are counting on their OBGYNs that are acting as their primary care provider,” Stephanie Winans, CEO and co-founder at Iron Health, told Fierce Healthcare. That comes with many barriers to care, whether it is referral issues or costs or wait times, she added. “It’s a very slick way to drive access to care that women need and a lot of them are not getting today.”
Iron Health’s virtual wraparound services are delivered by an advanced practice practitioner, supervised by the company’s chief medical officer. Iron’s tech platform is integrated into Privia’s EHR, so its providers can continuously access and coordinate care. Upon referral by a Privia provider, Iron reaches out directly to patients. This approach is also more affordable, the partners argue. Because Iron practitioners would be brought into Privia’s network, patients would continue being billed through Privia.
Iron Health is also providing primary care, behavioral health and gestational diabetes support to Privia Medical Group Gulf Coast providers, executives said.
“If you want to build a group for value-based care, you’ve got to go pretty heavy on the subspecialties,” Cone said.
“Knitting extended services to a woman’s OB/GYN practice provides evidence-based care under the supervision of their most trusted healthcare provider and reduces the likelihood of care happening in a silo,” Cone said.