Today, however, these same practices could become less valuable if they lose their most important asset, their patient base, to practices that already have managed care contracts. Managed care is increasingly where much of the action is today, and managed care's interest in contracting with your practice may depend on your ability to offer multiple levels of service. MLPs offer valuable staffing power in carrying out these programs. Patient satisfaction surveys, for example, indicate that more than 90 percent of Kaiser plan members throughout the country are satisfied with the use of MLPs in their primary care treatment. 1 MLPs can also help practices administer MCO contracts more successfully.
Success often requires considerable discussion back and forth between practices and carriers.
For their utilization review and quality assurance programs, MCOs need advanced information about patient status, which MLPs provide quite competently. MLP involvement makes physicians happy by freeing them from what can sometimes be cumbersome administrative tangles. It makes carriers happy by dealing with practices that are in compliance with administrative requirements. It makes patients happy by putting them on the receiving end of high-quality service from their clinics and carriers. And many MCOs find the idea of MLPs appealing because they provide care at the appropriate level while containing costs.