As an old saying goes, “timing is everything.” In value-based care (VBC), that’s especially true—particularly when it comes to data exchange. Timely data exchange is essential. It provides greater visibility into a patient’s overall health during a face-to-face encounter, enabling providers and payers to deliver the best care with the appropriate resources.
There’s no question that VBC thrives on accurate and timely data. Data identifies target patient populations. It spots risk factors and care gaps. It can highlight problem areas and drive appropriate interventions. And when leveraged effectively, it improves efficiency, measures progress and ultimately enhances VBC performance. At the end of the day, having a 360-degree view of current patient information is essential to making sense of a patient’s health and making the best care decisions at every encounter.
Despite the importance of leveraging actionable data at the point of care, there are some formidable stumbling blocks. Relevant clinical data is often siloed – stored in different systems that do not communicate with each other. Payers, providers and pharmacies maintain separate databases that are not reconciled. This can lead to conflicting information, confusion and ultimately, subpar care.
There has been a lot of progress to enhance integration and interoperability among various EMRs, stakeholders and systems — but we are still in the early innings. A lot of healthcare data is contained in unstructured formats or trapped in an EMR that doesn’t integrate with other databases. A readily available single source of truth with all relevant clinical information to inform a patient encounter and real-time decision making is rare. Therefore, providers and payers unknowingly make decisions based on incomplete and conflicting information. This impacts care and outcomes and leads to the inefficient use of resources.
While current and timely data exchange is critical, it’s not a panacea. There has been a lot of progress in healthcare technology, such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing, but nothing replaces the judgment and experience of a trained clinician. A lot of important patient information remains trapped in unstructured formats such as images and physicians’ notes, which technology alone doesn’t sufficiently address. In addition, complex algorithms are rendered useless if the underlying clinical data is inaccurate.
The holy grail is to arm specially trained clinicians with powerful tools to curate all relevant patient information at the time of the encounter and leverage technology to supercharge, not replace, physicians. The combination of the right data, the right clinical resources, at the right time would help drive the most efficient and informed patient visits, lower costs, enhance care and drive practice performance in VBC and other risk sharing arrangements.
How Vatica can help
Vatica Health offers a unique model that pairs expert clinical teams with cutting edge technology at the point of care. This innovative combination produces a powerful biproduct – sensemaking machines that help our clients wade through a sea of data to garner insights and make better clinical decisions.
Vatica’s licensed nurses curate all relevant clinical data to inform comprehensive visits. This information is conveniently documented and provided to the PCP prior to the visit. Only vetted HCC codes and care gaps are presented so PCPs can make the most of their time with patients. Health plans purchase the Vatica solution and make it available to PCPs in their network at no cost to help improve coding and documentation for risk adjustment. A key component of VBC, risk adjustment ensures that risk bearing entities are properly compensated and that adequate resources are available to care for patients, based on their specific conditions and healthcare needs.
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