Making Connections

Physician to physician, physician to hospital, physician to health plan, and most importantly - physician to patient. Northstar's role is to facilitate all of the above to bring together the resources needed most for patient care.

Value

How can we deliver value? A question we ask ourselves regularly, and deliver daily. From lowering costs on supplies, to ensuring we have enough flu vaccine across our network to working closely with our patient's health plans to provide a consistent, high level of care, Northstar delivers.

Our Services

Northstar Physicians is divided into a number of service areas:

Health plan contracting
- referral management
- capitation management including claims payment to providers
Clinical Operations which includes:
- Quality Improvement Programs
- Risk Management / malpractice pool
- Patient Safety Initiatives
- A pioneering Disease Management Program
- Utilization Review
- Care Coordination
- Patient and Provider Educational Programs
Group Purchasing
- medical/surgical supplies
- office supplies
- laboratory supplies
- reference lab contract
- x-ray
- equipment
- IT support
Electronic Health Record Assistance - helping independent clinics afford, implement and maintain an E H R in their operation. This includes several E H R options, technical support as well as hosting, and financing.
Training Programs
- medical records/coding networking and education group
- Quality improvement staff training group
- Clinic administrator group
- ongoing educational programs to meet the needs and challenges that arise throughout the year in healthcare

Each area provides an important service to the needs of our small, independent network of clinics.

What we are not: We do not own our member clinics. Our clinics are generally owned by the physicians who practice at each site. We do not replace a clinic's administration - we assist each clinic in the areas identified above. Good clinic administration is absolutely crucial to a a clinic's successful operation. We provide resources to the physicians and management of our member clinics.

For new start-ups, we do have an experienced practice management team available to assist in helping a clinic get started. When the clinic has grown large enough to afford it, we can then assist the clinic to recruit a good manager to continue to grow the practice in accordance with that clinic's goals.