Texas Health Resources and Aetna Establish New Partnership in North Texas

Texas Health Resources and Aetna recently announced the creation of a jointly owned health plan company that will focus on improving quality, affordability and the overall consumer experience. By combining Texas Health’s high-quality providers and investment in population health management with Aetna’s health plan expertise, care management capabilities and analytical insights, employers and consumers in North Texas will benefit from more affordable, high-quality and better-coordinated care.

The partnership between Aetna and Texas Health is the first of its kind in North Texas to fully align the incentives and capabilities of a national insurer and major health system. By sharing ownership and accountability equally, the new health plan will focus on the consumer experience by combining fully integrated care teams, health insurance benefits and administrative services to eliminate redundancies of care and to reduce administrative hassles.

New fully-insured and self-insured commercial products will be offered to employers and consumers in 14 counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, including Collin, Cooke, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Hood, Hunt, Johnson, Kaufman, Parker, Rockwall, Somervell, Tarrant and Wise counties, and are anticipated to be available on Jan. 1, 2017, pending regulatory approval.

The new partnership will feature the Southwestern Health Resources network as its core, which includes more than 500 physicians in Texas Health’s employed physician group, Texas Health Physicians Group (THPG). Texas Health’s 69 outpatient facilities include surgery centers, fitness centers, imaging centers and more than 250 other community access points. Its hospitals include 16 acute-care facilities, along with six short-stay, one transitional care and two rehabilitation hospitals.

“Over the past several years, the American health care landscape has begun to change, with increasing costs and quality pressures creating demand from employers and consumers for a new health care economy,” said Barclay E. Berdan, FACHE, chief executive officer of Texas Health Resources. “This partnership aligns our two organizations’ commitment to build more sustainable value-based models of care, which will help to deliver better outcomes and lower costs, while providing an unmatched patient and provider experience. It’s what consumers expect of us in this new economy and, frankly, what we expect of ourselves.”

The partnership with Texas Health is Aetna’s second joint venture with a nonprofit health system, as Aetna moves 75 percent of its contracts to value-based care models by 2020.