Caravan Health
The Voyage toward Better Patient Care

When Lynn Barr—a prominent name in the healthcare transformation movement and a medical IT expert—along with a pioneering team of industry experts joined hands in 2013 to begin Caravan Health, a voyage with an altruistic vision of providing better healthcare had begun. Started on a quest to help community hospitals and independent clinicians succeed in value-based payment models, Caravan Health today has gone a good step further in helping several institutions adapt to the changing landscape. By leveraging technological innovation and collaboration, they seek to facilitate the implementation of innovative healthcare models supporting quality, cost-effectiveness, and health promotion for the operational enhancement and well-being of community health paradigms. “We are helping community hospitals and associated physicians work together, by assisting them in building clinically integrated networks to serve a community,” says Lynn.

Caravan Health focuses on improving community health through operational enhancement, community engagement, and the efficient utilization of useful information based on clinical data. Under the guidance of various industry veterans, all the participating hospitals and clinicians are gathered on a single data platform, which makes it easy for sharing information, analyzing various resources, and reporting it back to the network.

In an effort to ensure efficiency for both patients as well as clinicians, Caravan Health’s expert team organizes meetings with every practice on a regular basis. Based on the performance data and its analysis, the firm develops action plans and provides a recommendation of the services that can be enhanced and suggests new initiatives that the client can embark on. Additionally, they bring together the steering committees of clinical networks—each quarter—for quality improvement workshops where new health programs and initiatives are discussed. “It is the perfect premises for everyone to learn from each other during the collaborative moments,” adds Lynn.

We have a collaborative learning network, where we generate insights from data and offer advice to clinicians on how to progress

Caravan Health believes that the key to a strong clinically integrated network is having full transparency on the performance of all of the members, and that’s the ultimate reason the firm uses various analytics platforms to figure out areas of improvement. Lynn explains, “We have a collaborative learning network, where we generate insights from data and offer advice to clinicians on how to progress.”

In what can be called Caravan Health’s unique differentiator, the company has a practice of focusing on improved success, where they believe in selling their models, instead of services. Lynn says, “We empower organizations to move into advanced payment models. Once moved, we provide best-of-breed services to support the adopted models and we educate them on the importance of data and information.”

Under the active leadership of Lynn, today, the firm stands a conglomerate, representing 23 Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), 164 hospitals, and 6,000 doctors. Moreover, Caravan Health has gained a 97 percent quality score, 257 percent national average of shared savings, and a whopping 100 percent application success rate. One of the most interesting instances, according to Lynn, is when Caravan Health achieved great success assisting Magnolia-Evergreen ACO. She explains, “Besides reducing costs by 8.4 percent last year, they also witnessed a remarkable increase in their income.”

In the long run, the firm focuses on offering the best quality medical services to patients across its network at the lowest possible cost. Lynn concludes, “We pay a lot of attention to the client business and their ROI. We have plans in place to double our operations in the coming year, marking grounds for exponential growth.”