Technologies for reducing quality measurement burden

Technology can ease the burden of quality measures reporting in value-based care.

Physician looking at a multiple computer screens.

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 are often bound to services designed to assist practices with managing value-based payment (VBP) 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 VBP 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

  • 300%

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

  • 96%

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

  • 100%

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

Accountable care organization (ACO) 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), and 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.

From the AAFP: Accountable care organization planning guide

An ACO’s organizational structure can have implications for the way it functions and its likelihood of success. Learn more about ACOs, including:

  • Implications and considerations

  • Key requirements for an ACO

  • Leadership for ACO success

  • Performance metrics

  • Cost reporting requirements

  • Questions to ask before committing to an ACO

  • Impact on price

Read the full guide

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