Alaska Primary Care Association
3111 C Street
Anchorage, AK
United States
The Alaska Primary Care Association (APCA) is the state community health center association that serves 39 FQHCs and other community health centers in the state. APCA has historically been a strong presence in terms of advancing integration and workforce, as well as a strategic leader in advancing and protecting the state’s Medicaid adult dental benefit. APCA has also been very active historically at a national level in supporting federal health center policy.
The primary focus of this proposal is to position oral health to be carved into an upcoming transition to Medicaid managed care, as well as other public and private value-based payment initiatives. Alaska is one of the eight remaining states that operates on a fee-for-service framework for primary care and there has been growing public and political will to move towards managed care. With this momentum, there is both a window of opportunity and critical need to ensure oral health is integrated into the managed care planning as much, and as early, as possible.
To do this, there are two strategies being proposed within the scope of work:
To leverage APCA’s role as convener and oral health advocacy leader with Alaskans Together for Medicaid (ATFM) and the Alaska Dental Action Coalition (ADAC) to unite around the importance of whole person care and oral health integration, as State of Alaska policy makers get on the backend of the pandemic and start shifting the Medicaid program towards value, quality and population health.
To strengthen the capacity of Alaska community health centers to build consensus around and pilot the use of dental quality measures to proactively build a case for future value-based payments and incentives.
In addition to the above two strategies, the intent is to implement new measurement strategies that will support analysis of population health data derived from interoperable third-party data systems (Azara DVRS). To do this, APCA will work with 10 community health centers to build a centralized data warehouse that will support oral health measures and align data-driven quality improvement and population health management that includes social determinants of health.
There are a couple value propositions for CareQuest Institute regarding this project. This proposal aligns with our interest in advancing value-based payment models as well as interoperable measurement systems that support deeper integration of care, consistent with work happening with the COrHT initiative. As well, there is a benefit to supporting Alaska’s work at this early state in the process of moving towards managed care and their work in population health management could support the broader field if fully implemented. The learnings from this work could be used to support the other states that have yet to move to managed care as they consider it, to ensure oral health is woven in.
The budget for this proposal is $100,000 which includes staff time, travel, and supplies associated with the activities as well as the cost of mapping out the centralized data warehouse and subsequent data maps within each health center. APCA will also leverage $20,000 as a carryforward from previous CareQuest Institute grant funded that was unspent due to the pandemic. This proposal budget represents about 1% of the total organizational budget.