Dayton Children’s Health has a clinically integrated network with a responsible care contract with Anthem for 20,000 lives.
PROBLEM
The health system has previously used a single-vendor system as the basis of population health. But that platform has reached the end of its life, and the vendor does not provide an upgrade roadmap. The supplier went out of business and Dayton needed another platform.
“This is an opportunity to look at the state of the market and take a leap forward with our mass health platform,” said JD Whitlock, CIO at Dayton Children’s Health. “We evaluated several options from the top population health management HIT providers and got a clear understanding of how they stack up, how they work, what they offer, and where they’re differentiated. .
“In the end,” he added, “we narrowed it down to two vendors and ended up choosing Innovaccer.”
PROPOSE
Innovaccer is a healthcare cloud company that provides a data platform for value-based care.
“Both vendors are able to provide us with a bird’s-eye view of our analytics and performance for executives and management,” explains Whitlock. “But I remember, when I was watching the demos, how both providers could provide patient-centered insights at the point of care in the actual emergency EHR that the PCP was using.
“The data and analytics that make it to the last mile is what matters. PCPs actually use it, because it really becomes part of their EHR clinical process.”
JD Whitlock, Dayton Children’s Health
“That’s important, because provider involvement at the point of care – in other words, influencing provider decision making and behavior while patients are sitting with them – is an effective way to most effective way to identify and close care gaps to improve quality of care,” he added.
He noted that previous generations of mass health platforms required PCPs to log into a separate portal to access the population health team.
“That’s a problem, because historically, as anyone who has worked with mass-health platforms can tell you, PCPs never used them,” he argues. “No PCP will ever leave their EHR clinical workflow and sign in to a universal medical group. That doesn’t happen.
“Public health portals have limited usefulness for that reason,” he continued. “We went to great lengths to collect all this data from all these different practices and perform fancy analyzes on all of it.”
And then, when Dayton adopted the previous generation system, the only people who ever considered it were the nurses who coordinated the care. That’s better than nothing, but it’s not the people Dayton wants to consider, it’s the point-of-care PCPs.
“With Innovaccer’s platform, PCPs can view that patient’s data in the population health pool, in any emergency EHRs they’re using, and as an integral part of their medical process. them,” Whitlock explained. “It doesn’t matter what EHR they’re using.
He added: “Whatever EHR the PCP is using, the overall patient record and analytics are there, at the PCP’s fingertips, as if it were part of the EHR that the PCP logs in – even though it’s real. is a separate application”.
MEET CHALLENGES ONLY
Dayton Children’s Health has a nurse/care coordinator/quality leader CIN that is leveraging the platform at the management level to drill down into data and score risks and gaps of care. She collaborates with CIN operations, shares data with respective stakeholders, and works to drive improvements using direct interaction with CIN and suppliers.
“It could be through regular meetings where she shares and discusses insights, or she can email reports to network providers and let them know what they’re doing. where,” Whitlock explained. “Information is being collected, analyzed, visualized, and disseminated. And of course, you get some improvements from that.
“But besides that, to really affect performance, you have to drive those insights to the point of interest in real-time,” he continued. “That’s where you start to scale. And the point is now our providers can get the prompts – clinical decision support – that we’ll make available to them through the platform. Innovaccer platform.”
Dayton implemented the platform and did the initial EHR integration with athenahealth. From there, it will be integrated with other EHRs used throughout the CIN.
“Ultimately, all EHRs will be interconnected and we’ll be able to get a big picture of population health across the CIN and drive better decision-making at the point of care.” with each doctor and their patient, in real time,” noted Whitlock.
RESULT
Whitlock said the measure of success in any responsible care contract is, Are you meeting your General Savings? Can you entice providers to reduce healthcare spending for a defined group of patients by offering them a percentage of the net savings received as a result of their efforts?
“So we’ll have to wait and see what the impact is, because, again, so far, we haven’t been able to technologically enable one of the most important aspects of our Savings success. General sharing: real-time physician engagement at the hospital. point of interest,” he noted.
“Analysis can only tell you what is happening, where it is happening, make predictions, suggest interventions, etc.,” he said. and insights. But you must be able to influence behavior by asking vendors to act on those insights to get results.”
Not every implementation of a population health management platform will suddenly have better results, he remarked.
“If people can’t see the data where it matters most, or if people don’t act on the data when it matters most, nothing will change,” he said.
“The industry has health systems that spend millions on data integration and common health analytics capabilities, and then nobody does anything about it,” he continued. “With Innovaccer’s system, it’s the data and analytics that make it last mile. It’s the PCPs that actually use it, because it really becomes part of their EHR clinical process. Surname.”
TIPS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
This type of technology is essential when you are pursuing a population health management strategy with a linked CIN, where you have all of these methods and all the different emergency EHRs that, by definition, you often incomprehensible. You need a solution that can deeply integrate into all of these EHRs, centralize and standardize data, and create vertical patient profiles that enable decision support in your clinical workflow. PCP.
The goal is to actually achieve Shared Savings.
“These tools are a necessary enabler of that,” he notes. “But there’s a lot more that has to happen, like the incentives that you set up in the health system, in your CIN. As I said before, health systems can invest in these technologies. tools, but what if they don’t really change they pay their PCP, if they don’t provide point of care details that support those incentives, nothing really changes .
He concluded: “Success depends on people, processes and technology, not just technology. “You need to align the technology with the operational and behavioral aspects, if you want, of how your organization operates to achieve those Overall Savings.”
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email the writer: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
