• Integrated Health Partners

Guardian print correction on IHP Story

"An article looked at some of the possibilities that could flow from the government's planned changes to the health service (NHS reform could see GP surgeries on stock market, 2 March, page 4). It said that one private health firm, IHP, was in talks with three GP consortiums to set up a company that would treat patients at 95% of the NHS cost. This putative saving, amounting to £40 per patient, would, our piece said, be booked as profit. What it should have said was that any such sum would be classed as earnings (of which, after costs were deducted, some portion could be booked as profit). We should also make clear that these figures were a rough calculation by the reporter, speculating on future financial outcomes, and not to be read as figures emanating from, or endorsed by, IHP." - from the Guardian website

Response to the recent Channel 4 feature and The Guardian article

The Channel 4 special report which aired on Tuesday 2nd March focussed on possible loopholes in the new health and social care bill. The Guardian also featured the story and both included an interview with Dr. Oliver Bernath, IHP's Managing Director.

Their erroneous interpretation of IHP's documents is that IHP will make it possible for GPs to profit personally from a loophole in the Health Bill by enabling them to share in the profits that IHP will generate through savings. The implication was that savings will be made by encouraging GPs to deliver less effective patient care. We would like to put the record straight.

Patient Benefits

IHP has always put the needs of patients first. If any savings initiative would not deliver patient benefits, we simply don't do it. We aim to deliver streamlined and redesigned services that make better use of NHS resources; the end benefit being better care for patients when they need it and where they need it. Through our work with our GP practices in Surrey, which now covers 35 practices and 340,000 patients, we have demonstrated that improvements in patient care and savings do go hand in hand. And patients welcome this result. As evidence, on a cold November evening, well over 100 patients turned up at a town hall meeting where our work was introduced by a patient himself.

We have benefitted from the active involvement on our Governance Board and through vibrant, results-focussed, patient participation groups. Our patients have helped shape services and many decisions. As an example, patients have designed our proprietary patient satisfaction tool which monitors what patients - not government - consider to be important. The results are broken down by practice, by individual GP and admin staff. We have not seen a similar system in operation anywhere else.

Economics

The NHS needs to improve productivity by 5% per year for the next 4 years to achieve the Government's objective of ￡20bn in efficiency gains. IHP can help make that happen in a way that protects patients from old-fashioned slash-and-burn of services by joining up community and primary care with better links to specialists. We use the skills we learned as organisational consultants and our knowledge of patient care as doctors to identify where bureaucracy and duplication can be ironed out of the system to save resources and deliver better care.

One tangible example of how this works is how we manage patients with chronic conditions. Every month all patients are screened to assess their risk of being admitted into hospital. Those with a high risk score are discussed in monthly clinical team meetings and a lead clinician is assigned to them who is then responsible for co-ordinating their care. As a result, patients get focussed, coordinated and more appropriate care while emergency admissions are avoided, thereby saving the NHS an unnecessary high cost of admission.

As a result from our Guildford pilot, the number of patients without a lead clinician has dropped from several hundred to zero, and emergency admissions have not increased while the rest of the country has gone up by 5%. We have ample positive patient feedback that supports the validity of our approach.

Public money into profits

The NHS is already using financial incentives to motivate change to achieve better outcomes. The reforms will make especially GP's income even more dependent on performance with "Quality Premiums". Better performance in achieving better quality care and making better use of resources deserves recognition. IHP is not proposing anything different. Crucially the incentive money is not money that would have otherwise been spent on patient care: without the changes, this money would have been wasted on the consequences of poor care.

Conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest are best managed if GPs are accountable for patient outcomes. Today, a GP could optimise the profits from his practice and the consequences might be that more patients would need to go to A&E or be admitted to hospital in an emergency because, for example, a chronic illness situation was not actively managed. If GPs are however responsible for performance and outcomes of the whole system, they will look each patient's needs so that they do not slip through the cracks until the only option is expensive hospital care.

In summary, IHP stands for "I help patients". But do not take our word for it ­ look at our results and talk to our patients.

© Integrated Health Partners Limited 2010