Farzad Launches Aledade

THE DOCTOR WEIGHS IN

Dr. Farzad Mostashari, former National Coordinator for HIT and more recently a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, has launched a new VC-backed company, Aledade. Aledade provides the smarts and some of the infrastructure to help independent primary care physicians form and join Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). ACOs are a new care delivery model in which doctors are paid to deliver the best care as opposed to the fee-for-service model that encourages them to do more care. Farzad notes in his blog that his tenure at Brookings allowed him to go on a healthcare "walkabout." He visited and talked to docs and healthcare wonks around the country and came away with 'a rare stereoscopic view of the change sweeping through healthcare - the anxiety of those with "one foot on the old business model's grave and the other foot on their new business model banana peel," mingled with the excitement of those who would disrupt the process.' He says, during the process, he also found his cause. "It's to help independent primary care doctors re-design their practices, and re-imagine their future...It's to support them with people who will stand beside them, with no interests other than theirs in mind. It's to promote new partnerships built on mutual respect, and business arrangements that they will truly reward them for the value that they uniquely can bring - in better care coordination, management of chornic diseases, and preventing disease and suffering. It's to achieve lower cost through better care and better health." Listen in on this fascinating discussion.