Here's a new strategy to help health plans build relationships with small physician practices for their provider networks: connect the practices with regional health IT extension centers.

"The extension centers don't know who all those small practices are," Joe Miller, director of e-business at AmeriHealth Mercy Family of Companies, said at last week's World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., Government Health IT reports. "We want them to target their marketing to attract those practices in our provider network." AmeriHealth offers Medicaid HMO plans in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, New Jersey and South Carolina, and half of enrolled patients received care from practices with fewer than 10 physicians.

HHS within the past two weeks named the last 28 of the 60 planned grants for regional extension centers, and the first centers have yet to open. AmeriHealth has opened discussions with one of the grantees in Pennsylvania, Miller said. "To the degree that we can be the connecting point or conduit between our provider network and the extension centers, we want to be that," he said.

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