| | FEBRUARY 20208By Mark Weisman, Chief Medical Information Officer, Peninsula Regional Medical Center"We are moving towards value-based care" is a great set of buzz words. We have all used them, especially if we need to impress the board. A line such as "We are positioning ourselves to be at the forefront of value based care through the utilization of artificial intelligence, telehealth and blockchain" contains enough buzz words in it to guarantee a promotion. Try it out and send me a thank you note when they make you CEO. However, the technology that is really important in value-based care is complicated and costly. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it but the financial incentives are still very much in favor of fee for service in most parts of the country. I believe that is why we continue to see very few areas making a meaningful change in the cost of care. I am providing this list of tools required to perform in a value-based care model so there is an understanding about the upfront costs to jumping in. · Access to data: A well run Health Information Exchange (HIE) can be incredibly helpful, but doesn't solve all our interoperability issues. In your area, if the major lab and independent imaging centers are not on your EHR then there can be significant time and money needed for integration efforts. Then there are claims data and social determinants of health data to bring in. Managing patients without a more complete understanding of their conditions and utilization patterns is very challenging.· Data aggregation capabilities: If you are successful in getting access to all this data, it now has to be normalized and ideally collated into a meaningful package that a provider can quickly ingest. No duplicate patient records and you can't put data in to the wrong chart. Many health IT shops shy away from this activity because it is hard, can be high risk, and frequently requires human labor to verify the data machine learning is not confident in its assessment. Google showed a demo of the tools they are working on in response to the Ascension article in the Wall Street Journal and their capabilities are worth watching. The ability to get data out of pdf files and other unstructured parts of the medical record will be a huge leap forward but is not commonplace today. · Registries: To do effective population health analytics, it is most efficient to have all that data from #1 and #1 above populate registries to track the chronic conditions. Usually available in the EHR but most have to be configured and maintained. To effectively deploy clinical decision support in real time to providers it is necessary to know if the patient in front of you has the disease in question and that data needs IN MY OPINIONWe are positioning ourselves to be at the forefront of value based care through the utilization of artificial intelligence, telehealth and blockchainTools and Capabilities Required for Value-Based Care
< Page 7 | Page 9 >