Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1120168
8 Thinking about value-based care? Lead with analytics By Erik Johnson, VP and Practice Lead, Optum Advisory Services B roadly speaking, value-based care is defined by partnerships and collab- oration between various stakehold- ers in a given market where insurance risk is shared. Stakeholders include provider systems, large physician groups and health plans. The many facets of value-based care continue to be talked about among health system CIOs. If a health system is consid- ering whether value-based care may be in its future, CIOs and the rest of the executive team need to ask some hard questions of executive peers, IT and other internal stakeholders such as: • Should we pursue value-based care? Perform a market economic survey to make sure the market will reward you for the significant amount of investment. There are efficient markets that have seen minimal cost growth over the last few years. They have already begun reaping the benefits of collaboration across different health plans and providers without requiring new financing mechanisms or financial incentives for providers to manage resource utilization. • Is the organization ready for value-based care? Imple- menting value-based care requires commitment from many resources in the organization. It is not a part-time, off-the- side-of-the-desk job but rather a full-time job that requires a fundamental reordering of investment priorities and resources. • What does IT need to do to empower value-based care? Analytics and reporting need to be embedded in execu- tive and clinical decision making with up-to-date data and specific audiences in mind. When I say analytics, I'm not re- ferring to predictive analytics, artificial intelligence or block chain. I'm referring to foundational data such as encounter and transactional data. Once you do that, you can begin to migrate toward driving population health design and care management changes. It's all about that data EHR data has a life beyond the transaction, data entry and de- cision support roles that get charted within the EHR workflow. Getting data out of the transactional EHR system and into an analytical system is no small task. Determine whether the EHR is feeding data and analytical warehouses in such a way that a data model allows for basic population health analytics. Make sure you have tools to report on the data. Eventually, you're going to want to look at data from performance analytics to answer more sophisticated questions. You can ask the basic question, how many diabetics? How many inpatient days last year, last month, or last quarter were associated with patients who had the primary diagnosis of diabetes? And how did that change year over year? It comes down to how robust your analytic infrastructure is. Have you built a layer within your EHR and your systems that can combine those data sets effectively and provide you some insight into longitudinal care patterns? Sponsored by: "CIOs and the rest of the executive team need to ask some hard questions." — Erik Johnson, VP and Practice Lead, Optum Advisory Services