Phoenix Children’s collaborative approach to value-based care relies on community input, big data analytics, and a physician-driven quality measurement program.
Mergers, acquisitions, and new partnerships can be a scary prospect for healthcare organizations, no matter which side of the negotiating table they are occupying.
In addition to potential cultural changes, staffing adjustments, and new workflows to adopt, organizations joining forces in the era of value-based care often have to adopt to new electronic health record systems and accept different strategies for measuring their quality, productivity, and outcomes.
While a successful union can rescue revenue cycles, and bring renewed vitality to flagging providers, healthcare organizations must carefully navigate the delicate acquisition process to ensure that new members of the team have the skills and tools required to reach their full potential.
At Phoenix Children’s, one of the largest pediatric health systems in the country, a desire to offer comprehensive care to the community has led to a firm reliance on big data analytics to gather actionable financial and clinical insights from a rapidly growing provider network.
Over the last three years, Phoenix Children’s has brought more than 100 independent practices into the fold, says Chad Johnson, Senior Vice President and Executive Director of the Phoenix Children’s Care Network – and full data transparency is a fundamental requirement for each and every new member of the team.
The ability to use big data analytics to measure productivity, quality, and financial success within a comprehensive network of care will be vital for Phoenix Children’s as it continues an ambitious move into value-based reimbursements.
“During 2017, we’re moving around 100,000 lives into fully risk-based models,” Johnson explained to HealthITAnalytics.com. “We’re doing this because we believe that the way to truly influence outcomes is to own the medical management of our populations. Hospitals will need to have a much larger footprint – a larger, integrated network – that includes independent primary care and specialty groups under one umbrella.”
“We want to move aggressively down this path because we feel that unless you’re willing to take that step, you’re never going to be able to really bend that cost curve,” he added. “We’re confident that we can step up to the plate and succeed in a risk-based environment with the strategies we’re cultivating.”
Number one on the list of challenges as the health network shoulders more financial risk is how to accurately and consistently measure quality across so many disparate locations and provider types.
“We’ve had to integrate data from these practices, which are all using a variety of EHRs, and then figure out how to consume that data and present it so that it can be used for optimizing care and to verify quality improvements across the network,” Johnson said.
“We use this data to target interventions, and to improve the management of our populations, our performance on quality metrics, our utilization, and total cost of care. That data becomes the number one essential driver of many of the decisions that we’re going to make within our pediatric health enterprise.”
HENRY KOTULA 