What Defines a Healthcare IPA?

What is IPA Healthcare?

IPA in healthcare is a network of independent physician practices that contract with different health plan companies to negotiate business ventures with other healthcare organizations, minimize overhead costs, and create appropriate medical processes to improve care quality and health outcomes. 

Since IPAs are self-supporting entities and are not involved with large medical corporations, physicians have full authority to their own offices and practices. Practitioners can tend patients enrolled in their affiliated health maintenance organization (HMO), including the ones who are not. The healthcare services they provide are compensated according to a per-patient fee or discounted fee schedule payment. Meaning, they are still paid regardless of the number of times their patients visit them. IPA defines healthcare in coordinated network and independence.

The Advantages of IPA

One of the primary advantages of IPAs includes risk reduction and cost-sharing. But, clearly, aside from providing better and cost-effective care, IPAs have a lot more benefits that they can offer to both physicians and their patient population. What they may lack in manpower and size, they make up for the competency and value of their service. Here are the major advantages of IPAs:

• The expertise to skillfully negotiate contracts with health insurance companies and payer organizations to reduce the total annual cost per member or patient
• The ability to easily take on high-stability roles of accountable care organization (ACO) whenever necessary 
• The capacity to cut back discrepancies and errors in office compliance, medical, and healthcare record management
• The control of being independent while also leveraging administrative support
• The viable alternative to provide value-based care in small practices
• The means to maximize facilities and technologies that support administrative and management functions

IPAs serve as the supportive organizations that empower independent physicians by providing infrastructure to methodically enact their healthcare goals and ultimately enhance patient experience and satisfaction.

Systematically Elevating Solo Practitioners and Small Physician Groups

Solo practitioners and independent physicians alone cannot provide a full and quality care performance due to the lack of scale and resources. But, creating connections and partnering with IPA allows them to have their most needed assistance that they may otherwise be unable to get elsewhere. 



Because of IPAs, these small health providers can easily land contract deals with health plans, invest in new technologies, including management systems, and compete with hospitals or larger physician groups; all of which are components that constitute the quality of health outcomes in the continuum of care.

Let QuickCap Contribute To the Success of Your IPA Healthcare Management

The shifting landscape of the healthcare industry continues to influence how organizations and businesses function. As such, IPAs need a sophisticated platform that can keep up with it. Luckily, QuickCap, a flexible and configurable management system can meet the ever-changing demands of the market with these comprehensive features: 

• Set up customized contracting and pricing for fee-for-service (FFS), value-based, and fee schedule payments.
• Auto-adjudicate claims and efficiently process records in formats such as EDI files, scanned claims, and a whole lot more.
• Automate authorization verification, including other processes and workflow through a rule-based system.
• Validate member eligibility and requirements for accurate medical services provision.
• Streamline online data movement for electronic data interchange (EDI) files, electronic health records (EHRs), and other clinical documents.

From processing EHRs to payment pricing, QuickCap has everything an independent physician needs to create and implement effective IPA healthcare management.

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