Ranzal Healthcare Analytics (RHA) Productivity Management Overview

In this brief demo, you’ll see how to leverage your interactive dashboard to drill down by department, by pay period, by job code, by employee, by any productivity metric you gather, to support and enhance your day-to-day labor management activities.

Patient Panel Analytics

In a recent interview with a provider about how to gain some efficiencies in her practice, I asked how many patients she was caring for with a diagnosis of cancer in the past few years. After a “from the hip” answer, I showed her a report from one of her payers, and she became frustrated that the payer had a better summary of her patients than she could obtain from her own EHR.

Healthcare providers and management need to be empowered with tools to analyze information about their practice in which much effort is spent creating the data.

This podcast will demonstrate our Accountable Care Analytics Application’s ability to define patient panels and provide integrated summaries of patient information from clinical and claims data sources.

Accountable Care Analytics: A data-driven approach to achieving value-based healthcare

Edgewater’s Accountable Care Analytics application is a comprehensive set of data integration and business intelligence capabilities for use by clinical, financial, and care management professionals that empower organizations to improve quality and reduce costs across a spectrum of care delivery settings.  The application streamlines many of the labor-intensive aspects of capturing and reporting quality and financial performance of accountable care, alternative quality contract, and similar risk-based arrangements operating in healthcare today.  It achieves this by enabling healthcare providers to take a data-driven approach to understanding the impact of quality, cost and outcomes on performance across the extended ACO enterprise.

In this podcast, Edgewater provides a high level overview of the Accountable Care Analytics application.

ACO Disease Specific Analytics

“What can Edgewater’s Accountable Care Analytics do for me that we cannot already do with our EHR and patient financials reporting?”

To be successful, ACOs and other integrated health systems must bring together both clinical and claims data – and they must make the data available for use by clinical, operational and financial leadership across the entire organization.  The biggest challenge our clients face is an ability to provide management this data now, to drive early operational decisions. This is what Edgewater’s Accountable Care Analytics can do – provide organization-wide dashboards for decision support in advance of the complex and time consuming integration projects these health systems face.

This podcast shows a quick demonstration of the capabilities our ACA application.

Edgewater Healthcare Analytics

I recently read an article called “The 4 Biggest Obstacles ACOs Face” on Forbes.com that I found really interesting. In it, the author identifies what I think are the primary challenges for Accountable Care Organizations (ACO). But, I would change the order.

ACOs need a management structure in place to make critical operational decisions. But those decisions should be made leveraging enterprise wide data. So, the primary challenge for ACOs — Providing management with accurate, actionable data to make management decisions, before all of the technical integration challenges have been addressed.

To learn more about Edgewater’s Accountable Care Analytics application, and how it can help you get meaningful data to ACO decision makers, email us.

The Politics of Data in an ACO

Imagine the following scenario. You discover that you are the victim of identity theft, purchases have been made in your name, and your personal credit has been ruined. You are saved, though. You have paid a watchdog organization to monitor your credit, and they have information that clears your good name! So, when you apply for a loan with a bank, you request the credit monitoring agency to share the details of your prior credit problems and its resolution with the bank. But the monitoring agency will not share that information because that might help the bank understand your needs and negotiate a better price for their own credit monitoring service that they resell to their customers – i.e., you. The monitoring service won’t release your information.

Would you put up with this conflict of interest? NO!

In healthcare, we routinely tolerate a form of this conflict of interest, and in many different forms. Even though health insurers are not providing the patient care directly, these payers tend to accumulate a very useful holistic view of each patient’s history, including information from the perspective of what care was provided based on payment being demanded by many different care providers. There are numerous instances where, if this information was shared with other providers, it could positively impact the care management plan, doing so in a more timely manner, and increasing the likelihood of improving the quality of care the patient receives and possibly reducing the overall cost of care across an extended episode.

Here is an example- A patient is admitted to the hospital and receives a pacemaker to address his atrial fibrilation. After being discharged, the patient follows up with his cardiologist who has reduced the dose of digoxin, having diagnosed the patient with a digoxin toxicity. However, the patient attempts to save a few dollars by finishing their current prescription only to be admitted to the hospital a couple of weeks later for the toxicity. This is an opportunity where the care manager could have intervened based on the cardiologist’s toxicity diagnosis being submitted to the payer and no prescription was filled within a few days. The care manager could have helped the patient be more compliant with the cardiologist’s instructions avoiding an inpatient admission.

Healthcare provider organizations and payers (and in some cases regulators) are working together to break down these walls in an effort to increase value across the spectrum of care delivery and the industry in general. However, the sometimes conflicting vested interests of these interacting payers and providers can still be an obstacle, influencing the politics of information disclosure and sharing in the emerging environment of accountable care delivery models.

There is great diversity in the participating organizations that collaborate to make up an ACO. This is definitely not one size fits all. Viewed from the perspective of sharing risks across parties without the immediate concern about maximizing volumes, the integrated provider-based health plans, such as Kaiser Permanente, Geisinger Health System, and Presbyterian Healthcare Services, are already inherently sharing this risk and are reaping the rewards as a single organization. That’s great for the few organizations and patients that are already members participating in one of these plans.

Unfortunately, for other organizations there is still much more to be worked out regarding proactive sharing of data both within an accountable network of providers acting across care settings, and with the payer(s). Within the network, hospital systems usually have some of the infrastructure in place and they know how to routinely share data between systems and applications using standard data exchange conventions such as HL7 and CCD. In collaboration with HIE’s these systems can help facilitate active data distribution, and they very often provoke the organization to address some of the more common aspects of data governance. However, even when this routine “transactional” and operational data is being exchanged and coordinated, there is still a great unmet need for the ACO to buy or build a data repository for the integration and consumption of this data to support reporting and analytics across various functional areas.

Many organizations encounter further challenges in defining and agreeing on which are the authoritative sources of specific elements of data, what are the rights and limits on the use of these data, and how can these assets be used most effectively to facilitate the diverse objectives of this still-emerging new organizational model.

An even greater challenge for some ACOs is collecting the required data from the smaller participating provider networks. These organizations often have less capability to customize their EHRs (if they even have EHRs in place) and less resource capacity to enable the data sharing that is required. To get around this, some ACOs are:

• Standardizing on a small number of EHRs- (ideally one, but not always possible) This provides the potential to increase economies of scale and leverage the shared learnings across the extended organization.
• Manually collecting data in registries– Although not always timely, this addresses some rudimentary needs for population-focused care delivery and serves to overcome common barriers such as the willingness of a given provider to collect additional required data and complying with standards.
• Not collecting desired data at all– While this seems hazardous, progress toward the overall clinical and/or financial goals of the ACO can still be positive, even if an organization cannot directly attribute credit for beneficial outcomes or improvements within the organization, and the ACO can avoid the overhead of collecting and manually managing that data.

Regardless of what data is collected and shared within the ACO, the payers participating often have the highest quality, most broadly useful longitudinal data because:

1. The data is ‘omniscient’ – it represents, in most cases, all of the services received by (or at least paid for) that patient – provided a claim for those services has been submitted and paid by the participating payer.
2. Some of this data is standardized and consolidated making it easier to manage.
3. The data is often enriched with additional data residing in mature information systems such as risk models, and various disease-focused or geographic populations and segments.

Consequently, payer data very often forms the longitudinal backbone that most consistently extends across the various episodes constituting a patient’s medical history and is very important to the success of the ACO’s mission to drive up quality and drive down costs. Despite this opportunity for an ACO to improve its delivery of care to targeted populations, sharing of data is still achieved unevenly across these organizations because some payers feel the utilization, cost and performance data they have could be used to negatively impact their position and weaken their negotiations with the hospitals and other provider organizations.

While claims have traditionally been the de facto standard and basis for many of the risk and performance measures of the ACO, more progressive payers are also now sharing timely data pertaining to services received outside the provider network, referrals between and among providers, authorizations for services, and discharges, further enabling ACOs to utilize this information proactively to implement and measure various improvements in care management across the spectrum of care settings visited by patients under their care.

Collaboration between provider organizations and payers at a data level is moving in a positive direction because of the effort given to ACO development. These efforts should continue to be encouraged so as to realize the possibilities of leveraging timely distribution of data for better treatment of patients and healthcare cost management.

Moving from Volume to Value: How Do We Get There?

Listen to any healthcare pundit or industry observer longer than their opening paragraph and you’ll hear them use the current buzz phrase: Healthcare needs to move from volume to value.  See, there it is already.

We pretty much know where the volume comes from.  If a buyer, any buyer, agrees to pay an acceptable fee for each unit of a needed service, the service provider will soon recognize that the delivery of more units of those services to satisfied buyers yields more payments.  Simple enough, and healthcare service providers have responded as one would expect in this environment.  The fees paid for each unit of service motivate the healthcare provider to maximize throughput – to the limits of their capacity to deliver a satisfactory service – and this leads to an increased volume.  Yes, there’s also quality and necessity and regulation, but right now we’re talking about volume.

So, what about the value part?  What is going to drive value?  And value to whom?  And who is going to measure the value?  And decide how much to pay for it?  Unfortunately, several tenets of basic economics that ordinarily drive value (and operate in virtually every other transactional setting) are disrupted in the healthcare marketplace as payers and providers of every shape and size, employer- and other group-inspired benefit plans, preferred provider and referral networks, watchdog quality and safety groups – as well as the inherent complexity of the subject matter – all serve to distance the patient from a free and informed buying decision.

By the time the ultimate treatment decision is made, it has been framed and prodded by so many ancillary parties that the patient, sitting alone with the provider, can almost feel the other observers in the room; those who will decide after the fact, or who have decided well before the fact, whether this decision is appropriate and how each party in the transaction will be compensated, billed, measured, rewarded or penalized according to a growing litany of performance measures.  If the patient doesn’t feel all of this, the provider often does.

The complexity and confusion arise in part because each of the above fundamental elements has been intermediated – to one degree or another.  The patient – the ultimate target of the treatment – is not the only buyer.  Buying decisions affecting this single transaction were defined, negotiated and contracted months or years in advance, and are being monitored against a wide range of both clinical and financial measures before, during and after the single transaction between a given patient and a given provider.  The terms of these agreements can and do influence the chain of decisions that culminate in the choice of treatment and in the cascade of financial events that will promptly follow.  No wonder it’s confusing.

So then, how does value get defined?  Several common themes emerge as both payer and provider organizations strive to identify the appropriate fundamentals, define a useful and informative notion of value, and introduce that notion of value into the decision processes they share with their patients.

The common elements that lead to a determination of value seem to go something like this:

• Who are my patients?  A fundamental question, but not always trivial to answer accurately or in a useful way that enables and extends visibility over a population.  Providers need to be able to identify each patient that is legitimately under their care and they must have access to a complete record of the care these patients have received as a baseline for measuring future performance.  Once this record is assembled the pattern of problems, interventions and care relationships can be discerned and used to both characterize and engage each patient.

Providers need to identify the core characteristics of their panel of patients so they can both tailor individual treatments and evaluate patient experiences and outcomes comparatively against similar patients they are treating or that are being treated by other providers.

In an accountable care world, if providers are assigned responsibility for patients retrospectively using a plurality of care or other statistical model, it doesn’t mean they have control over the care those patients are receiving. They can hardly be measured fairly on the outcomes those patients have experienced. They need to know the specific treatments these patients have received, their level of compliance, and what other providers they have seen, at what locations, and with what frequency. This increased understanding of their basic patient panel will begin to reveal the true nature of the relationships they (or others) have with these patients and will often constitute the first wave of relevant analytics into the value being delivered.

• What outcomes are we targeting for these patients?  What are the care plans that will get them there?  How long have these targets and plans been in place, for which patients, and what results are we seeing?The segmentation analytics that was started with the patient panel can now be extended, as specific performance targets are defined for individual patients and the projection of these targets is aggregated into clinically coherent segments, yielding outcomes and results that perhaps for the first time give visibility and insight into how well the relevant population is being managed.

Care teams and practice management can now monitor the clinical, operational and financial performance measures of the segments that drive significant costs and consume substantial resources, enabling the exploration of new deployment models.

• What is our baseline? For the patients’ and other payers’ expenditures for our services and for the actual costs we incur to deliver those services?  Virtually all risk-based contracts establish a baseline of expenditures using some form of statistical measure (e.g., weighted average) over a defined historical time frame.  Projecting the dynamics of patient mix, service mix, fee structures and delivery resources over the anticipated life of the contract provides a segment-able baseline for measuring and tracking contract performance and assessing value. From this foundation, organizations can apply complementary analytics so that under-performing practice areas or population segments can be localized and improvement programs can be appropriately focused and funded.  Over-performing segments can be examined and highlighted as potential sources of best practices targeted for broader dissemination.

• Who is accountable, and for what?  As the payment structure for many conditions moves to more of an episode-based model, the deployment and coordination of care delivery resources takes on added significance.  Roles and responsibilities must be defined for the delivery of episode-focused clinical services across the network of care settings. Proactive coordination of transitions in care and the associated communications, hand-offs and follow-ups must be defined and written into performance contracts along with explicit adherence measures.

These metrics will begin to form the basis for concrete and measureable accountability models and will likely be a consideration when shared gains and losses are assessed retrospectively.  Evolution toward more proactive accountability models is likely to follow.

Accountability models based on the actual outcomes realized, as distinct from adherence to best practices, can be differentiated through analytics, enabling some flexibility for care redesign (potentially including patient choice) or other measured innovations undertaken by providers.

• Are we correctly and accurately reconciling the various activities, billed services, payments, resource alignment and costs with our agreed-upon models for accountability?  This is non-trivial even within a single enterprise.  And now we have various ACO or ACA models where new participants are collaborating at levels they have never attempted before, and entering into risk agreements based on shared performance metrics.  Some organizations are experimenting with formal value stream maps where benefits and costs are explicitly modeled.  Others are punting any envisioned gains (or losses) to an aggregate ‘shared benefit’ to be ‘addressed later.’One key consideration is implementing at least some accounting (defining and tracking) of the revenues and the actual costs associated with care delivery to specific segments with different characteristics (e.g., populations, locations, groups, payers, service partners or venues).  These costs must not be (but often are) confused with the amounts the provider would like to charge; or the allowed amounts the payer will agree to; or the actual payment amounts received from all parties; or even the various provisional ratios used to approximate the real costs.  Accountability models will need to evolve much further if they are to offer any real operational decision-making value.

• How can we best focus our care delivery efforts across the populations we serve, in the care settings where we can reach them? What is our strategy for stratification and segmentation?  As the characterization of these populations (and segments) starts to show some useful predictive value, both payers and providers will be able to move to more proactive models of direct patient engagement, targeted use of resources or venues, and focused innovations in care delivery.

No one disputes that the changes underway in healthcare have the potential to be transformational, to varying degrees.  The complexity and diversity of the responses that will be required by various organizations is still taking shape and there are many variables that will determine the success that any given enterprise will achieve.

The core principles outlined here are being adopted and applied in diverse healthcare organizations to answer a few fundamental questions about the value they offer that, ironically, have been posed and answered for all time in other industries and economic settings.  Who is our customer?  What do they need or want?  Why are we the best organization to meet their needs?  How can we communicate the benefits and costs to all the parties who are involved in the decision to buy?  Can we deliver?  How can we measure these factors both as a baseline and on an ongoing basis so we can provide convincing evidence that we offer the best proposition of value to all concerned?  Healthcare organizations that can answer these questions and address the numerous issues that arise in their pursuit will have a leg up on everyone else and will both deliver the best value and enjoy the greatest success.

What I learned at HFMA’s Revenue Cycle Conference at Gillette Stadium

(…while the Patriots prepared to get their butts kicked)

Right from Jonathan Bush, the co- founder and CEO of athenahealth [the keynote speaker]: “Make Hospitals Focus on What They’re Good At – Everything Else, “Seek Help!” I can help define “everything else”. For now, I will keep it generally confined to the world of healthcare data – because I would argue more time, money, and effort is wasted on getting good data than almost any other activity in a hospital.

If you are a Chief Quality Officer, or Chief Medical Informatics Officer, or Chief Information Officer – what would you rather spend your budget on?

Your analysts collecting data – plugging away, constantly, all-day into a spreadsheet?

Outcomes: Stale data in a static spreadsheet…that probably needs to be double/triple-checked…that probably is different than what the other department/analyst from down the hall gave you…that you probably wouldn’t bet your house on is accurate.

Or your analysts analyzing data and catalyzing improvement with front line leaders?

Outcomes: Real time data in a dynamic, flexible multi-dimensional reporting environment…that can roll up to the enterprise level…and drill down to the hospital → unit → provider → patient level.

Here’s a hint – this isn’t a trick question. Yet, for some reason, as you read this, you’re still spending more money on analysts reporting stale, static, inaccurate data than you are on analysts armed with real time data to improve the likelihood of higher quality and patient satisfaction scores and improved operational efficiency.

The majority of the speakers at this year’s HFMA Revenue Cycle conference seemed to accept that providers are NOT good at collecting and analyzing data, or using it as an asset to their advantage. They also seemed to align well with other speakers I’ve heard recently at HIT conferences. If you’re like 99% of your colleagues in this industry, you probably don’t understand your data either. So do what Jonathan Bush said and GET HELP!

Are you “ACO IT-Ready”?

First things first, I believe the push for accountable care is here to stay. I do not think that it is a fad that will come and go as many other attempts at healthcare reform have. Having said that, I also strongly believe that very few organizations are positioned to start realizing the benefits that will come from this reform any time soon. It’s not for lack of trying, as many organizations are already recognized as Pioneer ACO’s. But the hard part is not being established as an ACO – it’s proving you’re reducing costs and improving quality for targeted patient populations.

The first step will being January 1^st, 2013. Some ACO’s will be required to start reporting quality measures – for instance the Shared Savings program from CMS for both the one-sided and two-sided models require reporting 33 quality measures. Notice I said “reporting”. So for the first year, it’s “pay for reporting”. Years 2 and 3 is when the rubber really meets the road and it becomes “pay for performance”. “Don’t just show me you are trying to reduce costs and improve quality, actually reduce and improve or realize the consequences.“

With ACO’s come reporting requirements. We in healthcare are used to reporting requirements. And those of us willing to publicly acknowledge it, more reporting means more waste. Why? Because there is job security in paying people to run around and find data…and to eventually do very little with it other than plug it in a spreadsheet, post it to a SharePoint site, email it to someone else, or well, you get my drift. Regardless of your view on these new requirements, they’re here to stay. So the $64,000 question is, are you ready to start reporting?

There is a wide range of both functional and technical requirements that healthcare providers and payers will need to address as they start operating as an ACO.  Many of the early and emerging ACOs have started the journey from a baseline of targeted patient panels to the optimized management of a population, progressing through a model with some or all of the following:

These are 7 simple questions you must be able to answer and report on DAY 1:

1. Can you define and identify your targeted patient populations?
2. Are you able to measure the financial and quality performance and risks of these patient panels and populations?
   1. Can you quickly, easily and consistently report quality and financial measures by Physician, Location, Service, or Diagnosis?
3. Can you baseline your expenditures and costsassociated with various targeted patient populations?
   1. How will you benchmark your “before ACO” and “after ACO” costs?
4. Can you accurately monitor the participation, performance and accountability of the ACO participants involved in coordinated, collaborative patient care?
5. Will you be able to pinpoint where and when the quality of care begins to drift, so as to quickly intervene with care redesign improvements to limit the impacts on patients and non-reimbursable costs?
   1. Are you able to detect “patient leakage” and provide your organization the information for its’ management? (Patient leakage is when a patient that you are treating as an ACO for a bundled payment, leaves the network for their care)
      1. Is a particular provider/provider group sending patients outside of the ACO?  If so, is it for a justified reason?
      2. Does the hospital need to address a capacity issue?
6. Can you reconcile your internal costs of care with bundled reimbursements from payers?
7. Are you positioned for population health management and achieving the Triple Aim on a continuing basis?

In order to answer these questions you must have a highly integrated data infrastructure. It seems I’m not the only one who agrees with this tactical first step:

• The Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine agreed as it listed as one of its’ 5 Core Competencies Required to be an ACO “Technical and informatics support to manage individual and population data.”
• Presbyterian Healthcare Services (PHS) has been a Pioneer ACO for over a year. Tracy Brewer, the lead project manager was recently asked by Becker’s Hospital Review, “What goals did you set as an ACO in the beginning of the year and how have you worked to achieve them” and her answer – “One of the major ones [goals] was updating our administrative and IT infrastructure. We had to make sure we had all the operational pieces in place to function as ACO. We also completed some work on our IT infrastructure so that once we received the claims data from CMS, we could begin analysis and really get value from it.”

The ACO quality measures require data from a number of different data sources. Be honest with me and yourselves, how confident are you that your organization is ready? Is your data integrated? Do you have consistent definitions for Providers, Patients, Diagnosis, Procedure, and Service? If you do, great you don’t have much company. If you don’t, rest assured there are organizations that have been doing data integration for nearly two decades that can help you answer the questions above as well as many more related to this new thing they call Accountable Care.

What I Learned at Health Connect Partners Surgery Conference 2012: Most Hospitals Still Can’t Tell What Surgeries Turn a Profit

What I Learned at Health Connect Partners Surgery Conference 2012: Most Hospitals Still Can’t Tell what Surgeries Turn a Profit

As I strolled around the Hyatt Regency at the Arch in downtown St. Louis amongst many of my colleagues in surgery and hospital administration, I realized I was experiencing déjà vu. Not the kind where you know you’ve been somewhere before. The kind where you know you’ve said the same thing before. Except, it wasn’t déjà vu. I really was having many of the same conversations I had a year ago at the same conference, except this time there was a bit more urgency in the voices of the attendees. It’s discouraging to hear that most large hospitals STILL can’t tell you what surgeries make or lose money! What surgeons have high utilization linked to high quality? What the impact of SSI’s are on ALOS? Why there are eight orthopedic surgeons, nine different implant vendors and 10 different total hip implant options on the shelves? It’s encouraging, though, to hear people FINALLY admit that their current information systems DO NOT provide the integrated data they need to analyze these problems and address them with consistency, confidence, and in real time.

Let’s start with the discouraging part. When asked if their current reporting and analytic needs were being met I got a lot of the same uninformed, disconnected responses, “yeah we have a decision support department”; “yeah we have Epic so we’re using Clarity”; “oh we just <insert limited, niche data reporting tool here>”. I don’t get too upset because I understand in the world of surgery, there are very few organizations that have truly integrated data. Therefore, they don’t know what they don’t know. They’ve never seen materials, reimbursement, billing, staffing, quality, and operational data all in one place. They’ve never been given consistent answers to their data questions. Let’s be honest, though – the priorities are utilization, turnover, and volume. Very little time is left to  consider the opportunities to drastically lower costs, improve quality, and increase growth by integrating data. It’s just not in their vernacular. I’m confident, though, that these same people are currently, more than ever, being tasked with finding ways to lower costs and improve quality – not just because of healthcare reform, but because of tightening budgets, stringent payers, stressed staff, and more demanding patients. Sooner or later they’ll start asking for the data needed to make these decisions – and when they don’t get the answers they want, the light will quickly flip on.

Now for the encouraging part – some people have already started asking for the data. These folks can finally admit they don’t have the information systems needed to bring operational, financial, clinical and quality data together. They have siloed systems – they know it, I know it, and they’re starting to learn that there isn’t some panacea off-the-shelf product that they can buy that will give this to them. They know that they spend way too much time and money on people who simply run around collecting data and doing very little in the way of analyzing or acting on it.

So – what now?! For most of the attendees, it’s back to the same ol’ manual reporting, paper chasing, data crunching, spreadsheet hell. Stale data, static reports, yawn, boring, seen this movie a thousand times. For others, they’re just starting to crack the door open on the possibility of getting help with their disconnected data. And for a very few, they’re out ahead of everyone else because they already are building integrated data solutions that provide significant ROI’s. For these folks, gone are the days of asking for static, snapshot-in-time reports – they have a self-service approach to data consumption in real time and are “data driven” in all facets of their organization. These are the providers that have everyone from the CEO down screaming, “SHOW ME THE DATA!”; and are the ones I want to partner with in the journey to lower cost, higher quality healthcare. I just hope the others find a way to catch up, and soon!