Category: Value-Based Care

10 year-end activities to optimize performance in value-based care

By Vatica Health | November 1, 2021 | Provider, Value-Based Care

2021 has been a challenging year for primary care physicians nationwide. They’ve risen to the challenge by remaining committed to providing value-based patient care during times of intense operational transformation and financial uncertainty. However, it hasn’t been without sacrifice. Sixty-six percent of primary care physicians say they often experience feelings of burnout. This isn’t surprising given the risks associated with COVID-19 exposure as well as the significant burden of non-clinical work that requires their time and attention. Internists, for example, spend nearly 20 hours per week on paperwork and administrative tasks. Nearly a quarter of physicians (23%) say the most challenging part of their job is navigating ever-changing managed care and regulatory compliance requirements. The silver lining is that COVID-19 cases are declining and there are solutions to help you improve clinical and financial performance.

With only a couple of months remaining in 2021, there are several steps you can take to ensure that your practice meets all performance targets and that your patients receive the highest quality of care. The good news is that most of these actions are often supported by payer-sponsored risk adjustment and quality programs that provide vital clinical and administrative support to practices. This support helps providers close care gaps, enhance coding and documentation, identify and assess social determinants, and perform patient outreach. To enhance performance under value-based care contracts, consider these 10 tips:

1. Review 2021 performance reports from payers. These reports are a treasure trove of information and identify opportunities for improvement. Common examples include patients without primary care office visits, patients for whom chronic conditions were coded in 2020 but not recaptured in 2021, patients with incomplete preventive screenings, and patients with open gaps in care. Gather internal resources and put action plans in place.

Keep in mind that data latency may result in delayed reporting. Consequently, best practice is to compare external reports with your patients’ medical records for confirmation. Your practice’s EMR may include information that has not yet been reported to managed care plans. This information may impact your performance in value-based care programs. Perform a thorough reconciliation of all data sources to ensure consistency, alignment, and accurate performance reporting for all patients.

2. Ensure all eligible patients have completed an annual preventive care office visit. Schedule annual wellness visits (AWV) and other preventive care visit types for eligible patients. These visits provide opportunities for each patient to complete their personal prevention plan and Health Risk Assessment. Annual physical exams allow physicians to address care gaps as well as proactively identify potential chronic conditions. Check patients’ records when they present for a sick visit and schedule applicable preventive visits. For patients who have not visited the office, proactive patient outreach signals that you care about their well-being and that your office is there to help. Remind them they’re due for a visit and assist with scheduling. These actions foster trust and build stronger patient-physician relationships.

3. Follow up with patients who miss scheduled appointments. Consider whether any of your patients are missing appointments or not accessing routine care due to socioeconomic barriers?

Social determinants have a significant impact on health outcomes. As such, it is important to proactively reach out to vulnerable patients and address those barriers? The American Academy of Family Physicians provides some helpful advice.

4. Follow up with patients who were referred for preventive screening but did not comply. Patients’ needs and challenges vary. While some may have forgotten about the recommended screening, others may be experiencing difficulty scheduling the appointment due to long call wait times or limited appointment availability. Others may have unanswered questions that prevent them from taking action. The best practice is to call patients directly, assess the barrier, and determine what the practice can do to help. Oftentimes, a reminder call is all that’s needed.

5. ‘Close the loop’ with specialists. Communication between primary care physicians and specialists is important to avoid fragmented care delivery and ensure patient satisfaction. Ensure care continuity by following up with any specialists to whom patients are referred. Request findings and recommended treatment plans, as applicable, an update your EMR with relevant clinical information.

6. Keep close tabs on patients with multiple chronic conditions or who are on multiple medications. Do patients take medications as prescribed? Are their chronic conditions controlled, or are they at risk of acute exacerbations? The goal is to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital. If your practice hasn’t yet started a chronic care management program, now is the time to do it. For elderly patients who are on high-risk medication regimens, conduct a thorough evaluation, and consider lower-risk alternatives.

7. Conduct patient outreach after an acute event or hospitalization. Schedule appointments to review aftercare plans and make sure patients understand and can implement these plans. Do patients understand the specialists with whom they must follow up? Do they know what medications they must take? Do they know who to contact if they have questions? Can they recognize signs and symptoms that would warrant a phone call to their doctor? These are important questions to review with your patients.

8. Evaluate office workflows. Focus on preventive care, prioritization of high-risk patients, coordination of care, and strong communication with other members of each patient’s care team. Where are the deficiencies and how can the team improve processes? Research and evaluate technology solutions that can seamlessly integrate with your office’s existing systems and improve workflows while reducing operating costs.

9. Improve documentation and coding accuracy. Schedule dedicated time for role-specific training and education that includes front office staff, medical coders, and providers. Individuals serving in each of these roles must understand how their actions (or inactions) impact the accuracy and specificity of medical record documentation and coding. This information directly impacts performance calculations, care delivery, and potential payments.

10. Leverage free external resources. External resources such as local community programs can often provide support for patients and serve as an extension of your practice through their focus on improving quality of life. For example, there are programs that can help address social determinants of health. Additionally, health plans sponsor risk adjustment and quality programs that provide clinical and administrative resources to support primary care practices. Leveraging these programs improves quality of care and patient satisfaction while reducing the burden on physicians. This, in turn, reduces the risk of burnout and attrition.

How Vatica Health can help

Founded in 2011 as the first preventive services technology solution designed specifically for physicians, by physicians, Vatica Health remains a pioneer in physician-centric technology and support solutions that directly improve clinical outcomes, efficiency, and financial performance. Vatica Health deploys on-site or virtual licensed, clinical nurses that serve as extensions of your team at no cost to the practice. Vatica Health is accelerating the transformation to value-based care by helping providers, health plans, and patients work together to achieve better outcomes. To learn more, visit https://vaticahealth.com/.

Unlocking value-based care performance with improved coding and documentation

By Vatica Health | May 24, 2021 | Provider, Risk Adjustment, Value-Based Care

The transition to value-based care is underway, but many PCPs lack the tools, resources, and expertise to thrive in these new arrangements. For physicians, an essential element of success is being able to accurately assess and report a patient’s clinical needs so that value-based payments will align with the necessary care delivered to that individual. Unfortunately, diagnostic coding with appropriate specificity and quality reporting is labor-intensive and is predicated on a complex set of rules, which frequently become a stumbling block for practices.  This dynamic creates a powerful inertia, which can be overcome by understanding the ramifications of inaction and the availability of effective solutions.

Why is documentation so important?

Provider organizations—through their documentation—tell their patients’ stories using the ‘language’ of ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes. Robust documentation and coding provide a comprehensive view of the patient, driving better and more cost-effective care. If documentation is incomplete, patients may not get the necessary care and practices can incur significant shortfalls in revenue.  As a result, high quality coding and documentation is no longer just a good practice, but an indispensable element of value-based care success.  

 The Financial Impact of Accurate Documentation & Code Capture

The example below illustrates how no or partial coding by a physician can result in $15,000 difference in payment under the CMS-HCC model based on whether the provider captures these four diagnoses with maximum specificity: Type 2 diabetes mellitus with a manifestation of stage IV chronic kidney disease, long-term insulin use, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Improving Coding and Documentation Without Burdening Physicians

According to a 2021 national survey conducted by Medscape that included more than 12,000 physicians across 29 different specialties, 42% of physicians report feeling burned out.

Interestingly, 79% of physicians said this burnout started before the current COVID-19 pandemic with the majority (58%) citing ‘too many bureaucratic tasks’ as the number one reason.  This presents a challenging dilemma as business leaders for health systems and physician practices have to balance the reality of physician burnout with the necessity of improved documentation and coding.

Fortunately, there are solutions that drive improved financial and clinical performance without burdening physicians and their staff. Vatica Health is one example. Vatica takes a physician-centric perspective, focusing on minimizing the amount of time and effort required of physicians. Vatica uses a combination of powerful technology along with clinical and administrative resources dedicated to practices.  Organizations participating in Vatica’s program realize incremental revenue, better outcomes, increases in the utilization of preventive health encounters (e.g., Annual Wellness Visits), and improvement in overall performance in value-based care arrangements.

Learn how to maximize revenue and results for your organization

How to succeed in value-based care with service-enabled technology

By Vatica Health | January 7, 2021 | Provider, Risk Adjustment, Value-Based Care

More and more primary care providers (PCPs) are entering value-based care arrangements, whether by choice or mandate. In fact, CMS hopes to have 100% of Medicare Advantage payments linked to alternative payment models by 2025.

With this new approach to care, it’s important for PCPs to understand the impact that risk adjustment and quality of care has on value-based care performance and assess whether their organization has the building blocks in place to ensure success. Unfortunately, PCPs are frequently impeded by insufficient time, data, and staffing resources, which prevents them from reaching their clinical and financial goals under these emerging payment systems. However, PCPs who address these gaps by evaluating their practices’ strengths, opportunities, and partnership needs are well-positioned to thrive in value-based care.

Risk Adjustment and Quality of Care

As we move to value-based care, providers will be compensated based on efficiently delivering better results—not more procedures. Value-based care is designed to incentivize providers to improve outcomes in a cost-efficient manner. In other words, payment and quality of care are inextricably linked.

Two critical components to any value-based care arrangement are risk adjustment and quality reporting. This is because success in value-based care depends on accurately assessing the clinical needs of your population, and reporting these needs so that your payments will be sufficient to deliver appropriate care.

The challenge is that risk adjustment and quality reporting is labor intensive and is predicated on a complex set of rules, which frequently becomes a stumbling block for practices. Because of the complex payment methodology associated with risk adjustment, appropriate coding specificity is needed to accurately report chronic conditions. Without this specificity, plans and PCPs may end up with artificially low patient risk scores, resulting in insufficient funds to deliver adequate levels of care. Similarly, PCPs must adhere to the reporting standards for quality gap closures, and deviation can result in sub-standard outcomes.

For practices that lack specialized coding and quality technology, as well as properly trained staff, keeping up with these activities is a significant challenge.

What to Look for in Service-Enabled Technology

More often than not, PCPs attempt to solve these challenges with the aid of technology. However, as many PCPs know, the implementation of new software can create more problems than it was intended to solve. With office staff burnout at an all-time high, it is important to make sure that any new tools being utilized are supporting, not hindering, the team’s success.
What should PCPs be looking for when selecting the right partner? Let us look at some common quality reporting and risk adjustment challenges and how your technology should address them.

Provider Documentation Support
Challenge: Due to lack of coding expertise and ineffective technology, provider documentation is often not specific enough to support the ICD-10 coding necessary to accurately risk adjust a patient. Many common chronic conditions, such as major depressive disorder, specified arrhythmias, staged chronic kidney disease, and others, can only be risk adjusted when specified in physician documentation.
Solution: This level of detail can be achieved with a combination of clinical decision support, computer-assisted diagnostic coding technology, and supplemental clinical staff. Because technology alone cannot eliminate these challenges, augmenting existing staff with clinical resources to supplement these technology solutions, commonly known as service-enabled technology, is emerging as a gold standard.

Coding Expertise
Challenge: Risk adjustment payment methodology is highly complex. While PCPs may have medical coders on staff, they often lack the specialized skills needed to code to appropriate specificity. To bridge this gap, health plans deploy vendors to perform either home assessments or retrospective chart reviews, which can cause patient and provider abrasion.
Solution: PCPs can avoid these pitfalls with EMR-integrated technology that is powered by algorithms that do the heavy lifting by surfacing the most specific and relevant codes. Because an accurate and complete data set for each patient is critical, providers should consider supplemental clinical staff to support provider documentation with the EMR to synthesize it with health plan data.

Seamless Quality Reporting
Challenge: Quality of care programs can be challenging for providers in value-based care arrangements. Providers often lack the data and tools to support the reporting and activities associated with these measures.
Solution: Providers should consider solutions that specialize in quality reporting to foster greater communication and collaboration with health plans. New service-enabled technology solutions change the way health plans and providers are working together to improve financial and clinical results.
In a nutshell, technology alone is insufficient. Providers need both powerful EMR-integrated technology wrapped with clinical and administrative support to drive superior value-based care performance. PCPs do not need another application to log into—they need a team of experts behind the screen helping the technology work for them.


To learn more about Vatica’s PCP-centric solution for Risk Adjustment Coding and Quality of Care, click here.

Improving quality of care and coding: The road less traveled to value-based care

By Vatica Health | September 8, 2020 | Provider, Risk Adjustment, Value-Based Care

Q&A with Vatica Health Co-Founder, Dr. Averel Snyder

At Vatica, we pride ourselves on being a company founded by physicians for physicians. Dr. Averel Snyder, a cardiothoracic surgeon, cofounded Vatica in 2011 after becoming frustrated with the mounting challenges physicians were facing. He set out to create a unique PCP-centric model that places providers in the driver’s seat of improving both quality of care documentation and practice revenue. We recently spoke with Dr. Snyder to discuss why he started Vatica and how risk adjustment and quality initiatives fit into broader, and timelier, industry issues including value-based care, the role of the PCP, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are not a lot of companies that solely focus on enabling physicians to perform risk adjustment coding and quality of care initiatives. What inspired that for Vatica?

It’s a funny story. Steve, my co-founder, and I initially started Vatica nearly a decade ago to enable physicians to more efficiently deliver the newly created Medicare Annual Wellness Visit. We knew that once we helped providers improve care and practice revenue, we could offer more comprehensive solutions. A couple of years later, I was attending a healthcare conference, listening to the CEO of a home assessment company boast about the benefits of his organization versus alternative methods of capturing diagnostic codes for the purpose of risk adjustment. He stated emphatically that their model was the best method for optimizing risk adjustment coding and stratifying patient risk, which enabled their health plan clients to accurately predict the costs on which their capitated payments are based. As he spoke, I felt myself becoming more frustrated by the minute because his claims seemed unfounded.

Immediately, I thought, this isn’t fair or accurate for a few reasons. First, PCPs are inappropriately being cut out of the financial and care loop. Second, it’s not in the patients’ best interest to be seen by a clinician with whom they have no relationship with and who does not have access to their complete medical record. Third, I wondered how non-PCP affiliated nurses were closing clinical and quality care gaps.

I went home and began to research the Medicare Advantage industry and quickly found that my concerns were justified—CMS also began to scrutinize the value of home assessments that failed to improve care and outcomes due to the lack of integration with the PCP.  

I had the proverbial light bulb moment. It struck me that we should empower physicians to use a simple interface to perform risk adjustment coding and capture quality of care data in a way that also improves their practice’s financial performance. I knew this could address an important pain point that most physicians feel—being overworked and underpaid. Plus, I knew that the treating physicians could do this work with greater efficiency and quality, leading to improved patient outcomes.

Fortunately, this insight, unlike many of my other entrepreneurial ideas, proved accurate, and nearly a decade later we have empowered thousands of PCPs to “take back” risk adjustment assessments. In doing so, we’ve helped improve outcomes and generated tens of millions of dollars for our provider network.

What makes Vatica’s solution different?

As a busy practicing physician for over two decades, I think I have a good sense of what frustrates providers—too many administrative burdens, not enough time, and declining income. We designed our solution with these frustrations in mind. We provide dedicated clinical support services to reduce administrative burdens, we negotiate health plan incentives to enhance PCP revenue, and improve quality by increasing the use of preventive services and helping to close care gaps. It’s a win-win-win—providers, health plans, and patients all benefit.

Why is it important to put PCPs at the center of risk adjustment?

I feel strongly that the PCP should be at the center of care. The treating PCP and their staff—not some randomly assigned clinician—is best suited to have the most efficient and effective face-to-face encounter with the patient. Given their relationship with the patient and access to all clinical information in their EMR, they are the most appropriate clinician to accurately document and code clinical conditions and close care gaps leading to better outcomes.

Talk to us about how Vatica helps PCPs succeed in value-based care.

Value-based care is about efficiently providing the highest quality of care to improve outcomes. There are a number of studies that demonstrate physicians in value-based care programs provide higher quality of care. Unfortunately, many PCPs lack the technology, expertise, staff, time, and other resources to thrive in value-based care. Vatica addresses this issue head-on. Unlike a lot of other solutions, Vatica is not here to make more work—we actually do 90% of the work for PCPs.

Vatica’s solution not only facilitates risk adjustment documentation and coding—but also enables PCPs to close gaps in care and increase the utilization of preventive services which are critical to improving outcomes. Powered by our technology platform, PCPs accurately capture all the active medical conditions with the associated documentation for clinical validation in the medical record. Vatica’s clinical consultants leverage all available data to create an accurate and complete view of the patient—the key to improving outcomes and performance in value-based care.

Why are risk adjustment and quality of care initiatives important to primary care providers?

Value-based care is designed to incentivize providers to improve outcomes in a cost-efficient manner.  Finances and quality of care are inextricably linked. Success in value-based care depends on accurately assessing the needs of your population so that your payments will be sufficient to deliver appropriate care. And for PCPs, this should be an urgent initiative since each year alternative payment models shift more risk to providers. I’ve heard providers say, “When value-based care comes, then I will pay attention to risk adjustment.” But, then it’s too late. The CMS data collection lags approximately three years, so your allocated resources for patient care in 2021 may be dependent on your coding and documentation in 2018. The time to focus on it is now.

What are the compliance risks for PCPs and health plans with other risk adjustment and quality of care solutions?  

In a standard risk adjustment data validation audit for a health plan, a meaningful percentage of the submitted diagnosis codes will be unsubstantiated in the medical record. Most of the approaches to risk adjustment are not meeting the new standard, which requires clinical validation. As a physician, it was important for me to design a solution that improved efficiency and mitigated compliance risk for providers. To accomplish this goal, we aggregate all available clinical data from the EMR and present all active medical conditions and their associated documentation for clinical validation to the treating provider. The provider is then responsible for selecting an appropriate ICD-10 code and completing “TAMPER” documentation. Then, as a fail-safe, after the provider e-signs the visit, we ensure that 100% of the codes are reviewed for completeness and accuracy by our team of AAPC CRC™ certified nurses, prior to submitting the codes to the health plan. We also deliver comprehensive provider ICD-10 coding and documentation training, which I personally provide and oversee.

What keeps you up at night in the current situation, with all the changes and disruptions in care during the pandemic?

PCP practices, particularly those who serve seniors, have endured some serious challenges. Reimbursement models are changing, and the new models demand vigilant documentation, accurate coding, additional practice resources, and subject matter expertise lacking by most physicians. At the same time, health plans are struggling to maximize risk adjusted revenue to ensure that seniors, who are the most vulnerable and costly patients, are receiving quality care and improved outcomes. Fortunately, CMS approved telehealth for a variety of encounters, including risk adjustment, and in-office patient volume has also started to bounce back from the post-pandemic decline. I think CMS will have to continue to adapt and make changes to the Medicare Advantage HCC model to account for the missed outpatient care during the pandemic. I am concerned about the increasing demands and worries of the PCPs, but I am optimistic about our ability to be a true partner, and subject matter expert, to help them succeed in this everchanging environment.

To learn more about how Vatica helps providers, watch our quick overview video.