ACOs
Today’s ACOs face a major healthcare data integration challenge. Many patients receive a portion of their health care treatment outside the purview of their primary care provider and it is up to the ACO to convince external providers, such as a specialty provider, to participate in the shared health program of that patient. This situation requires that every ACO have systems in place that enable the rapid ingestion of patient data from incompatible data formats or unstructured data sources, such as visit notes, transcripts or physician letters, normalize it and enabling reporting and query of those records in real-time.
Managing a shared saving program involves collecting patient data from a broad range of community healthcare providers, and pulling insights from that data in real-time.
Additionally, independent physician-lead ACOs, especially, are challenged by the requirements to accurately track and monitor the contribution of each participating provider when it comes incentive payment distributions, or to effectively manage the performance of contributors that cause the outcome/value analysis to fall outside “incentive” parameters or lead to penalties. Again, this requires accurate data ingestion and timely reporting on provider and facility performance metrics to enable improvement adjustments before the overall population results go south.
In order to move from “islands of data” to “shared data” environments requires systems that can integrate patient information from all sources, of all types, with a high level of confidence and accuracy, and make it available in near real-time for ad hoc query and reporting purposes.
Better Managed Shared Savings and Patient Care
- Interoperability – The IMAT platform enables ACOs to aggregate, validate, normalize, and effectively utilize ALL structured and unstructured data gathered from the participating healthcare community. The system enables the ACO to output that data in a standard format that can be used by other, authorized systems for further processing and analysis.
- Timely and Accurate Access to Data – More accurate data combined with real-time results leads to more timely and better informed decisions affecting individual patient health, population trend spotting, as well as more accurate reporting on quality and performance measures. Complex query results that used to take hours to generate can be accomplished in seconds on the IMAT system, even when working across billions of records.
- Reporting – The IMAT Medical Query Builder provides an intuitive and interactive user interface for the creation of ad hoc queries and reports, accessible through an administrator-defined dashboard.
- Research & Analytics – The comprehensive gathering of patient data enables the IMAT system to deliver thorough and accurate reports supporting: individual patient progressions, quality /value initiatives, population trend analysis, provider and facility performance comparisons, and more.
- Security – The IMAT platform meets or exceeds the applicable security standards set forth by the government, such as under HIPAA, for the storage and handling of PHI.
- Compliance – The IMAT platform enables ACOs to generate the reports required for complying with government reporting standards.
- Reliable Data Storage – The IMAT platform takes advantage of industry best practices to ensure that patient data is available and backed up.
Flexible Deployment Models – The IMAT platform can be deployed on client-side servers maintained in a central data repository; as a cloud-based platform securely accessible through the Internet; as a federated deployment across multiple locations and data stores. The system enables multiple organizations to participate in an Exchange community, while keeping each provider’s patient data secure.
How ACOs benefit from more accurate, timely reporting
- Track value-base reimbursement measures – Through the effective use of ALL healthcare data, the IMAT platform enables ACOs to more accurately track and compare measures, such as hospital readmissions, across all participating providers and facilities. With the proper tracking in place, ACO leadership can intervene, if a provider or facility begins to fail on acceptable performance parameters, and suggest corrective measures before overall population metrics and related incentive payments are impacted.
- Preventive Health Care Coordination – Leveraging the ability to work with all data from across the continuum of care, ACOs can better identify at-risk populations and recommend preventive care strategies to the providers utilizing these results.