Earlier this summer, Michael Hunt, DO, CMO and CMIO of St. Vincent's Health Partners, was recognized by the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems with the 2014 AMDIS Award for excellence and outstanding achievement in applied medical informatics.
The award honors Dr. Hunt's and SVHP work in improving population health efforts at the Bridgeport, Conn.-based physician-hospital organization and what Dr. Hunt sees as one of his biggest accomplishments — leading SVHP to become the first organization in the country to be accredited by URAC as a clinically integrated network. The organization also received a perfect score during the review.
To earn URAC accreditation, CINs have to show how they are improving clinical outcomes and population health. To this end, SVHP partnered with McKesson, implementing McKesson Population, Care and Risk Manager software and serving as an alpha site for McKesson Care Manager to gather and analyze data on clinical quality and care efficiency. Using the software, physicians can see data-generated risk scores for each of their patients, as well as information on which patients have visited the emergency department or been admitted as inpatients. That information helps physicians craft action plans to care for their populations more efficiently, says Dr. Hunt.
"Today, [healthcare providers are] data-rich but information-poor," he says. "What we have done is taken data sources and managed to make [that data] accurate and timely to help doctors make decisions."
Using aggregated SVHP data, Dr. Hunt and his team also created a "playbook" to help standardize care practices among physicians and increase accountability. "[The playbook] articulates what the current evidence-based care guidelines are, articulates all of the measures the providers should take and then holds them accountable," says Dr. Hunt. The playbook also outlines all of the potential transition of care situations Dr. Hunt's team has identified — more than 140 in all — and outlined steps to take and information to transmit for each one.
"We use the playbook as a living document to empower our members to manage patients together," says Dr. Hunt.
The efforts have already begun to pay off. In less than a year, SVHP has seen a 25 percent reduction in overutilization and a significant improvement in acute-care admissions, says Dr. Hunt. And, despite a 10 to 12 percent turnover rate among attributed patient lives every month, the PHO has been able to avoid a spike in care gaps as patients cycle in and out of the organization's population.
To other organizations looking to improve their population health management, Dr. Hunt has a simple recommendation: data. "Don't be afraid of data," he says. "Physicians can't do everything themselves... [data] can tell them which patients need more attention than others — it's about empowering them to work smarter, not harder."
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