Healthcare providers today must develop a greater understanding of the factors that drive their populations’ decisions. Creating and maintaining personas that share similar characteristics, should be considered a best practice for attaining these actionable insights.
As the healthcare industry moves toward value based care, reimbursement will be tied to quality outcomes achieved. While the concept is simple enough, operating under this model brings some complications. Advanced analytics will help healthcare organizations understand what is currently happening, what is likely to happen and what actions they should take with the limited resources in place.
Below are five ways that healthcare organizations could accelerate their success with their value-based initiatives by leveraging advanced analytics:
#1: Get the full picture with a 360 degree view. When attempting to understand patient/member behaviors, trends, habits and actions, it is critical to bring together a variety of data sets in order to create a complete, 360 degree view of each member/patient and provider. By accessing data such as medical claims, pharmacy claims, enrollment, health risk assessment (HRA) and survey, lab & biometric, EMR/EHR, socioeconomic, etc., healthcare providers can make sound decisions based on facts in order to improve patient/member outcomes.
#2: Understand populations. Knowing the makeup of the population served is critical to the success of value-based initiatives. An organization must understand the clinical and financial risks that exist across their populations in order to implement programs to manage that risk. Analytics can help to categorize various patient populations as high, medium or low risk. Once they have identified where the risk rests today, they can use predictive analytics to predict where it is likely to surface in the future. With this knowledge, healthcare organizations can make more targeted interventions.
#3: Allocate resources. All healthcare organizations are managing their business with limited financial and human resources. By leveraging advanced analytics, those resources can be focused on areas that promise to produce the greatest return on their investment. For example, by assessing impactability (Impactability is predicting and identifying prioritized opportunities that have the greatest clinical and/or financial outcomes), healthcare organizations can determine how likely it is to reduce emergency department visits or inpatient utilization if care gaps are closed with specific patients/members.
#4: Avoid costly procedures and services. As healthcare organizations strive to deliver next-level quality care, they will begin to pivot to precision level personalized care management opportunities. One such method to raise the stakes is identifying the best care choices when working with conditions that lend themselves to preference sensitive treatment options. This occurs when patients present with conditions or ailments where there are no definitive clinical guidelines and a variety of potential treatment options exist. For example, when patients present with knee or hip pain, surgery is not the only option. Indeed, providers, in some instances, could treat the pain just as, or even more effectively with other less invasive options. By providing the patient with education regarding more effective, less invasive treatment options with conditions such as uterine fibroids and endometriosis; both quality cost and satisfaction can be improved. By understanding who is at high risk for these types of potentially avoidable procedures, knowing the total episode cost as well as the remaining time to utilize a less invasive option, care providers have the opportunity to reduce the number of invasive, costly procedures.
#5: Deliver personalized care. In most cases, healthcare providers find that delivering personalized care tends to result in more effective care. But nearly all care management programs strive for personalized, effective care. So, what is the answer? The answer may lie in developing consumer types across populations. Consumer types is a method of categorizing patients/members based on like attributes such as age, gender, education, income, etc. By knowing the various consumer types and their attitudes that makeup a population, healthcare organizations can develop, evaluate and market care management programs to the most effective patients/members. For example, if a diabetic patient lives in a food desert, it would be difficult to get them to comply with a healthy eating plan. Or, access to transportation may be a barrier to adhere to a medication plan, as they might be required to trek to the post office just to pick up their prescription drugs.
At the end of the day, care givers seek to gain insight into not only what has happened, but what will happen and then what should I do about it. With so many competing priorities, it can be extremely difficult and overwhelming to know where to begin. By using advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics within daily workflow, healthcare organizations are able to confidently allocate resources to focus on high-value opportunities that will improve both clinical and financial outcomes.
As provider organizations continue toward value-based outcomes and reimbursement, the risk is too high to rely on assumptions. Providers must take insight-driven actions around key objectives such as managing risk, improving quality and provider network management.
As provider organizations continue the journey toward value-based outcomes and reimbursement, such as MACRA, they face many critical decisions that will impact their business and patient outcomes. The risk is too high to rely on assumptions and interpretations. Instead, providers must be able to take insight-driven actions around key objectives such as managing risk and improving quality and provider network operations - areas that can significantly impact cost and quality outcomes.
Understanding best practices to using data and analytics to face these challenges head-on can be a critical tool to drive value-based contract performance, as well as deliver key insights needed to successfully manage at-risk contracts and populations.
As an industry, we understand a tipping point is on the horizon. The question to ask is: Will your healthcare organization be ready for it?
By the year 2020, value-based care is expected to be the dominant payment model, according to a survey conducted by Lazard. The upshot? Healthcare provider organizations will have to deal with new realities – by implementing new strategies.
Below is a quick rundown of what might come into play as the transformation takes hold.
4 New Realities in a Value-Based World
1. Healthcare networks will need to focus on efficient care delivery. Successful networks are likely to include tightly aligned providers. And care will be rationalized among lower cost alternate care sites such as ambulatory facilities, pharmacies and urgent care centers.
2. Healthcare delivery systems will increasingly compete on quality and cost. And, to succeed, advanced analytics will be needed to understand variation and improvement opportunities. Greater efficiency will be achieved by standardizing care across settings and addressing variation while managing a population’s health.
3. Care delivery is best developed and delivered by teams with a focus on care coordination.
4. Value based care is here to stay. With MACRA, MIPS and other value-based payment programs, providers have started their adoption journey and agree that reducing healthcare costs while ensuring quality is the only viable option.
6 Strategies for Success
1. Understand the data that your organization collects. Having a data strategy that centers on using impactful data vs. big data (all data). Trend identification is the key.
2. Prepare to rely more heavily on layering data (clinical, financial, behavioral, etc.). Providers should pair the right data together in order to understand where and how care is being delivered – and the nature of any care gaps that exist across care networks. As such, providers will be able to target and improve overall care delivery and quality.
3. Use predictive and prescriptive analytics to transform data into impactful intelligence. Organizations will need to not only understand what happened, but also predict what will happen in the future and what the best strategy is to reach desired outcomes.
4. Drive quality improvements. No matter where providers are on their journey toward value-based care delivery, all will need to focus heavily on delivering higher quality care using the most efficient and effective methods. Providers also must meet quality measures in order to maximize performance in value-based contracts.
5. Manage population and financial risk. Understand where risk exists across your network and identify high ROI opportunities to reduce that risk.
6. Optimize provider networks. Insights into issues such as referral patterns and leakage can help networks improve efficiency, reduce costs and manage provider quality performance.
The adoption of value-based payments is happening now and accelerating rapidly. It is our observation that payers, providers and consumers are transitioning to these models, but each at varying speeds. Regardless of their location on this path, healthcare organizations need to focus on using data and analytics as a tool that will guide them in meeting their quality-based goals.
In summary, the industry if finding that all healthcare organizations have will be focusing on using data and analytics as a tool that will guide them in meeting their quality-based goals.