Next-Gen Healthcare Delivery: The Pivotal Role of APPs in Future Care Models (81H)

The time is now. Health systems need to take focused, comprehensive action to envision care delivery of the future or will quickly lag behind competitors. Demographic changes are reshaping both healthcare supply and demand. The aging population is growing—a patient segment that traditionally drives operating losses. Meanwhile, the workforce is shrinking and driving up costs. Projections for 2026 depict a shortage of 300,000 nurses and 200,000 physicians. Health systems have a demand management problem. They need to rethink the care model to deliver care of the future, and advanced practice providers (APPs) play a pivotal role in both meeting the demand for care and managing escalating costs.

This session will share how one health system reimagined the care delivery model of the future and the APP's role in it. UVA Health has a robust APP workforce with 500+ clinicians spread across ambulatory and acute care sites—inclusive of nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants, and others. Like at many health systems, the expansion grew organically over several years. There were inconsistencies in roles, practice models and expectations, limiting APP effectiveness and UVA's ability to leverage this important workforce. UVA leadership worked to reaffirm the expectations and practice models, create incentives and systems to support the new expectations, and elevate the role of APPs. This would support UVA's ambulatory and inpatient goals and position them to maximize revenue capture given potential CMS changes to split-shared billing rules. To support the APPs in the transition to the new operating standards, UVA established a new Center for Advanced Practice. The Center focused on APP professional development and served as a "professional home" for APPs across UVA Health. The Center partnered with the Revenue Cycle team to model the impact of the anticipated split-shared billing changes for various areas and to design billing training modules that would assist APPs and physicians in the new billing rules. UVA will share the journey and how the work has meaningfully advanced the APP workforce while positioning the health system to meet broader access and throughput goals and the healthcare delivery system required of the future.