Oak Street Health to open new clinic in Freeport
The interior of an Oak Street Health office. Credit: Oak Street Health
A new clinic in Freeport will specialize in treating patients who have Medicare coverage.
The Oak Street Health office at 14-16 Brooklyn Ave. is due to open on Tuesday. It will be open on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and it has a patient support phone line available 24 hours a day.
The clinic offers in-person, video and phone appointments for primary care; wellness and preventive care; laboratory testing; immunizations and care for chronic health conditions. It also can help patients set up mail-order prescriptions and make appointments with specialists and social services. The office has 10 exam rooms and is staffed by a physician and two nurse practitioners, Oak Street said.
The Freeport office is Oak Street’s 17th location in New York. The Chicago-based company also plans to open an office at 210 Fulton Ave. in Hempstead later this year.
Oak Street accepts original Medicare Part B plans that cover doctors’ visits, as well as certain Medicare Advantage plans, Medicare Supplement or Medigap plans and combination Medicare-Medicaid plans, the company said in a news release. The federal Medicare program covers people who are 65 and older, as well as younger people with end-stage renal disease and certain disabilities.
Oak Street was acquired by CVS Health in a deal that valued the primary care provider at $10.6 billion, Rhode Island-based CVS announced in May. Oak Street aims to improve patients’ health while cutting costs, CVS said.
The chain of clinics relies on an increasingly common way of paying for health care, called “value-based care,” in which insurers give providers financial incentives for improving quality and reducing costs. Typically, payments are based on the expected cost to treat each patient’s conditions. By contrast, “fee for service” providers are paid based on the services they perform.
Value-based care “centers around the idea of improving healthcare quality for patients and preventing problems before they begin,” Dr. Yonette Davis, senior medical director at Oak Street Health, said in a statement. “Unlike the traditional fee-for-service model, where providers focus on and are paid based on the number of services provided, value-based care enables providers to focus on healthcare outcomes.” Focusing on preventive care, she said, “helps us keep our patients healthy.”
Oak Street said in a release that compared with Medicare bench marks, it has reduced hospital admissions and emergency room visits by about 51% and cut hospital readmissions within 30 days of discharge by 42%.
In April, a CVS division called CVS Accountable Care Organization, Inc., and Rockville Centre-based Catholic Health announced they would work together to provide nearly 40,000 Long Island-area Medicare recipients with primary, specialty, walk-in and home-based care as well as help with transportation, food and housing for those in need. That agreement also involves value-based care.
Under that arrangement, Medicare pays CVS Accountable Care on a monthly basis for treating patients, with the payments based on the expected cost to treat the patients' conditions, CVS said. In turn, CVS provides incentives to Catholic Health for meeting quality and cost-savings goals such as providing preventive care and avoiding unnecessary emergency room visits and hospital stays.
Maura McDermott is a reporter on the investigations desk. Since starting at Newsday in 2012, she has also covered real estate and the business of health care.
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