Weekly News Roundup: June 14, 2019

Population health is the phrase of the week. In this week's roundup: a lesson from precision medicine that helps inform healthcare leaders on improving population health; three ways healthcare professionals can use social media to improve population health; an introduction to a data- and analytics-first approach to population health management; and how academic medical centers can boost population health management.

Data Accessibility and Analytics Enables Data-Driven Emergency Care

Thirty percent of the entire world’s data is generated in the healthcare industry, with valuable information often locked in the EMR. For Orlando Health, the data required by operational leaders to effectively run emergency department operations were not easily accessible. By utilizing its analytics platform, Orlando Health leadership has expanded access and visibility to data to drive improvement efforts.

Introducing Population Builder™: Stratification Module

The Health Catalyst Population Builder: Stratification Module allows healthcare organizations to identify the right patient populations in order to deliver the right care at the right time. The solution provides a seamless process for stratifying populations from multiple sources (EMR, claims, and clinical), using pre-defined, easily customized populations as building blocks. With a comprehensive view of the patients they manage, organizations can map populations along their continuum of care and confidently transition appropriate populations to population health interventions.

Introducing the Health Catalyst Population Health Foundations Solution: A Data- and Analytics-first Approach to PHM

Introducing the Health Catalyst Population Health Foundations solution, which draws on integrated claims and clinical data, and provides essential, extensible tools and machine-learning capabilities for optimizing results in value-based risk arrangements. Accompanying solution services ensure that the strategic value of data is maximized to improve performance in risk contracts—and provide side-by-side subject matter expert partnership for establishing short- and long-term goals for population health management.

Weekly News Roundup: June 7, 2019

A health system's board of trustees plays a critical role in decision-making and governance but often lacks oversight. In this week's news roundup: six guidelines for engaging the board in quality and safety; AHA study shows that hospital boards see low turnover but lack diversity and succession planning; an assessment tool allows health system boards to track their performance; and, why all hospital boards deserve greater scrutiny

Health Catalyst Named 2019 Healthcare IT Corporate Innovator

Utah HIMSS (UHIMSS) recognized Health Catalyst for its innovative leadership with the 2019 UHIMSS Healthcare IT Corporate Innovator award. Dale Sanders, Health Catalyst President of Technology, accepted the honor on behalf of his organization at the UHIMSS 2019 spring conference on May 17. He shared some key insights into what makes a great environment for ongoing innovation, including these valuable sources for invention and originality:

1. Mischief
2. Humor
3. Depression
4. Pen and paper
5. Naivety
6. Pattern recognition
7. Walking

Engaging Health System Boards of Trustees in Quality and Safety: Six Must-Know Guidelines

The quality and patient safety movement of the early 21^st century called for greater board of trustee involvement in improvement. However, too many health systems still don’t have the resources in place to effectively engage their boards around quality and safety measures. Six guidelines describe how organizations can better leverage data to inform their boards:

1. Emphasize quality and patient safety goals.
2. Leverage National Quality Forum-endorsed measures.
3. Use benchmarking and risk adjustment to select targets.
4. Access data beyond the EHR.
5. Provide data and information for multiple organizational levels.
6. Develop a board-specific measurement and presentation strategy.

Weekly News Roundup: May 31, 2019

Healthcare payer models are changing rapidly. This week's roundup features new and emerging healthcare payment models: the top five financial opportunities for payers; healthcare experts weigh in on the five new CMS Primary Care payment models; why some healthcare executives are calling for Stark Law reform; and what payment looks like in social determinants of health programs.

Today’s Top Five Healthcare Payer Financial Opportunities

Healthcare payers today must develop new business models to address the industry’s mounting challenges around cost, access, and quality. The best emerging models are simple and aligned, accommodate all stakeholders’ needs, and center on the patients/members. Five key payer opportunities provide a framework for new models that will support the healthcare transformation goals of lower cost, better quality, and increased access:

1. Understand the impact of the Affordable Care Act.
2. Be ready for potential shifts due to regulatory impacts.
3. Understand how social determinants of health impact members.
4. Focus on provider relations.
5. Prepare for future trends.

The Foundations of Success in Population Health Management

Built on Health Catalyst’s foundational technology and supported by the nationwide experience and perspective of its experts, the Population Health Foundations solution helps organizations leverage multiple data sources to understand their patient populations and create meaningful views of financial and clinical quality performance. As a starter set that organizations can build on based on their needs, the solution is designed to compensate for the known limitations of “black box” population health applications that fail to reveal the “why” of analytic insights and exacerbate the challenges of transforming quality, cost, and care. The Population Health Foundations solution delivers the essential analytic tools needed for success under value-based risk arrangements:

• Unified claims and clinical data.
• Transparent tools for ad hoc analysis.
• Web-based patient stratification and registry building.
• Dashboard of quality and financial performance metrics.
• A flexible, enabling analytics starter set upon which additional Health Catalyst PHM tools can be integrated and added.
• Side-by-side partnership with population health experts.

In this webinar you can expect to:

• Review recent changes to the field of value-based care, and reactions and insights from the market.
• Discover how the Population Health Foundation solution can act as a comprehensive, data-first analytics solution to support your population stratification and monitoring needs.
• Understand how this solution functions as a foundational starter set for value-based care success, enabling clients to leverage all their data and other relevant population health tools.
• Access a first-reveal of the Population Health Foundation solution demo, which presents the solution through the lens of an at-risk population and contract.

Weekly News Roundup: May 24, 2019

With the right evidence, analytics, and methods, providers and improvement teams can transform healthcare, improving the quality of patient care and the bottom line. This week's news roundup focuses on healthcare quality improvement projects: top examples, battling prolonged lengths of stay with data, closing care gaps with technology, and streamlining data for health plan quality reporting.

Data-Driven Approach Successfully Engages Orthopedic Surgeons in Decreasing Opioid Use

Community Health Network (CHNw) was keenly aware of the impact that opioid prescribing patterns have on potential opioid misuse and set a focus on decreasing opioid prescriptions; however, it lacked access to meaningful data that could be used to understand the volume of opioids that were prescribed postoperatively. CHNw created an orthopedics guidance team and leveraged data within its analytics platform to gain insight into prescribing habits over time.

Physician Burnout and the EHR: Addressing Five Common Burdens

So far, the EHR hasn’t delivered on its original intent to improve patient care with more efficiency and personalization and lower cost. Instead, physician users blame the systems for worsening their experience and the quality of their care in significant ways:

1. Less time for patient interaction and worsened quality of interaction.
2. An extended workday.
3. Poor design (difficult to use).
4. Demands of quality measures.
5. Cost and maintenance.

Despite these challenges, the EHR is likely here to stay. Health systems have invested heavily in their electronic reporting systems and are now focused on making these technologies and processes work for the benefit of patients and providers. CIOs are working towards better aligning digital health goals with physician experience for an environment where EHRs enable smarter, not harder, work.

Weekly News Roundup: May 17, 2019

This week's news roundup is all about ACOs: the past, present, and future of ACOs and CINs; why some provider groups want to make the next generation of ACOs permanent; the reason some ACOs stay in the MSSP; and why half of ACOs are likely to exit MSSP due to new downside risk requirements.

ACOs and CINs: Past, Present, and Future

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and clinically integrated networks (CINs) are two types of organizations working to address the problem of rising costs. As ACOs and CINs continue to evolve, organizations moving into value-based care (VBC) face an ever-changing landscape. This article looks at the evolution of the ACO and CIN models, what new tools ACOs employ today to promote success, and lessons learned from organizations that have succeeded in alternative payment models. It also explores what healthcare experts believe the future of alternative payment models will look like and competencies to develop to meet those changing demands.

Weekly News Roundup: May 10, 2019

This week’s news roundup focuses on improvement opportunities and digital solutions for payers: how healthcare analytics is helping payers thrive with increased financial risk; trends in healthcare payments; how health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers are falling short when it comes to medication access for autoimmune diseases; why communication is key for out-of-pocket patient costs; and more.

Healthcare Analytics for Payers: How to Thrive Through Shifting Financial Risk (Executive Report)

To stay in sync with healthcare’s transition to value-based care, payers today must develop the analytics capability to support alternative payment models and drive more value to their members. Payers can follow an analytics roadmap to develop a strategy that extends their data, analytics, and risk management expertise to meet growing demands. The analytics roadmap helps the payer meet these common challenges of establishing a data-driven culture:

• Recruiting and retaining high-quality providers in a competitive market.
• Managing increasing numbers of high-risk/high-cost members with limited resources.
• Efficiently reacting to federal and state legislative and payment changes.
• Controlling the rising costs of healthcare services and pharmaceuticals.

Healthcare Analytics for Payers: How to Thrive Through Shifting Financial Risk

To stay in sync with healthcare’s transition to value-based care, payers today must develop the analytics capability to support alternative payment models and drive more value to their members. Payers can follow an analytics roadmap to develop a strategy that extends their data, analytics, and risk management expertise to meet growing demands. The analytics roadmap helps the payer meet these common challenges of establishing a data-driven culture:

• Recruiting and retaining high-quality providers in a competitive market.
• Managing increasing numbers of high-risk/high-cost members with limited resources.
• Efficiently reacting to federal and state legislative and payment changes.
• Controlling the rising costs of healthcare services and pharmaceuticals.

Analytics Helps Population Health Coordinators to Better Treat Chronic Conditions

Improving the management of chronic diseases for patients is crucial for reducing expenses and improving health outcomes. Newton-Wellesley Hospital, a member of the Partners HealthCare system, adopted the population health coordinator role and utilized analytics to help identify variations in chronic disease management across practices and develop standardized best practices aimed at reducing costs through better outcomes for patients.

Why Healthcare Costing Matters to Enable Strategy and Financial Performance

In this webinar Steve Vance, SVP, Professional Services, Health Catalyst will explore different costing methodologies and discuss why activity-based costing is the preferable method to manage margins because it directly ties services to their costs. Many healthcare organizations base their costs on generalized drivers such as relative value units (RVUs) through their chargemaster rather than on specific activities associated with their services, leading to inaccurate assumptions and poor decisions. Attend this webinar to learn:

• Why activity-based costing should be your core tool for improving financial performance.
• The differences and implications between costing methodologies.
• How to leverage data from an Electronic Data Warehouse (EDW) and automate processes while improving accuracy.
• Ways that you can make strategic decisions using clinical and operational data when tied to costing data.
• Activity-based costing use cases such as:
  • Contract negotiations
  • Pricing decisions
  • Population Health Management (PHM)
  • Process improvement efforts