Technologies for Reducing Quality Measurement Burden

While work is underway to make quality measures digital, allowing technology solutions to emerge, you have limited options for reducing quality measurement burden. The technologies that do exist often are bound to services designed to assist practices with managing value-based payment and the revenue cycle.

The road map approach

Studies have highlighted the technological capabilities needed to meet the quality measure requirements across a practice’s various programs and lay the foundation for succeeding in value-based payment programs.

✔️ Documentation and coding

Visit note efficiencies, order sets, templating, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
Auto-captured quality measurement and compliance requirements
Automated coding, guided coding
Value-based care source of truth for “all payer results”
Coding and risk score support

✔️ Quality program performance

End-of-year reporting, in addition to more real-time performance tracking
Patient-level cost reporting
Patient dashboards or actionable care gaps surfaced seamlessly in the practice workflow

✔️ Panel management

Longitudinal care coordination between visits
Population health panel management for patient segmentation and care planning
Practice extended outside the clinic
Task management, integrations with care coordination software

✔️ Interoperability

Health information exchange (HIE) care quality, immunizations, registries
Admit, discharge and transfer notification of outside care
Notification of treatments

Pros:

Using a road map approach allows incremental adoption over time
You can adopt the best solution for you in each category
You can decide that you do not need a solution in all categories, forgoing that investment

Cons:

More work is needed to research solutions for each category
You must understand how each solution needs to integrate into your practice
You must undergo change each time a new solution is deployed

^{CASE STUDY}Elation Health panel management drives all-payer results

The Challenge

Customer is a physician organization supporting more than 800 independent physicians in the shift to value-based arrangements
New quality program requires increased administrative burden, added risk to practice revenue, and overall practice viability
Population health vendor was not effective in engaging providers, and lack of data integrity was causing inaccurate reporting

Elation's Approach

Seamlessly embed compliance requirements within natural clinical workflow, ultimately improving overall care quality and chronic condition assessments
Automate coding based on data already being captured in the visit note to reduce cognitive and administrative burden

The Results

21%
increase in chronic condition assessment rate

300%
improvement in post-hospitalization visit and medication reconciliation within 30 days

96%
of health care professionals performed better or earned more incentives than previous year

100%
of health care professionals were eligible for maximum performance-based incentive retention

Accountable care organization partners for independent practices

An accountable care organization (ACO) is a group of health care providers—including primary care physicians, specialists, hospitals and extended-care facilities—that is held accountable for the cost and quality of care delivered to a defined subset of traditional Medicare program beneficiaries or other specific populations, such as commercial health plan subscribers.

Companies that help independent practices transform, join, and participate in ACOs by providing technology enabled services >> Aledade, CVS (previously Signified Health), Agilon Health

Pros:

Using a service provider requires less work to understand operations than implementing solutions yourself
You alleviate burden by outsourcing part of the work
You can use data that ACO service providers collect from the practices they contract with to learn how to work more efficiently

Cons:

One-size-fits-all-solutions may not be tailored to your practice
The ongoing cost can be greater than going with stand-alone solutions
By outsourcing, you have become more dependent on that service provider, especially if there are not alternative service providers you could substitute