Failure to close care gaps can result in missed diagnoses, increased healthcare spending, and lower performance on value-based care contracts – yet reviewing patient charts to identify and validate care gaps is one of the most administratively burdensome tasks in healthcare.
During a March webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Notable, Dave Henriksen, Vice President of Clinical Operations at Castell, an Intermountain Healthcare company, discussed how his team is closing care gaps faster, with more accuracy, and without disrupting existing workflows. He was joined by Chris Moag, Clinical Solutions Lead at Notable, to discuss how intelligent automation can advance population health initiatives by expanding the capacity of their staff – ensuring that the right care is delivered to the right patient in the right place.
Three key insights:
1.) There are tremendous opportunities shaping population health.
- Accelerate participation in value-based care. With 42 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage, Medicare is the largest risk model available today and will continue to grow rapidly. Beyond Medicare Advantage, the financial impact of value-based care is increasing, with 36 percent of reimbursement payments now value-based.
- Align goals for payers and providers. Payers and providers are increasingly defining success with metrics that evaluate performance along the same criteria of health outcomes, patient experience, and cost reduction. For example, care cap closure accounts for about 26 percent of the CMS Star Rating.
- Use technology to enable efficient and high-quality care. Improving patient outcomes starts with meeting patients where they are. Technology plays an important role in automating workflows, expanding patient access with consistent engagement, providing actionable and data-driven insights, and automating risk capture – empowering staff to spend their time caring for patients.
2.) Castell adopted intelligent automation to transform population health initiatives like care gap closure. Castell is a comprehensive health services company that was created by Intermountain Healthcare in 2019 to expand its value-based care management programs. Core to its unique care delivery model, Castell embraces innovative technology to accelerate the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care (VBC).
Castell’s highly-trained care coordinators provide ongoing support to providers for tasks like chart review and member outreach. With half of care coordinator time spent on chart review, manual work was impeding Castell’s progress in ensuring patients received the care they needed. "We realized we were in a capacity crisis, we just couldn't hire enough FTEs to meet our growing demand," Mr. Henriksen said. “Through our partnership with Notable, we have extended the capacity of our current workforce and armed them with actionable insights to deliver the highest quality care to each and every patient. Now, they spend less time clicking and searching, and more time working with patients.”
With Notable, Castell has reduced average daily chart review time from four hours to one hour or less, resulting in an equivalent of 41 FTEs saved and $2.5 million in annual cost savings.
Castell is also partnering with Notable to provide a simple way for patients to complete their care management assessments. Self-reported patient data are pre-populated into care plans, streamlining data collection and reporting for NCQA accreditation criteria. “With Notable, we’re able to really focus on why we all went into healthcare: to help people. We’re not spending as much time doing the detective work; we’re spending time caring for patients – and by doing so, we’re getting people in for really important preventive measures,” shared a Castell care coordinator.
3.) Notable shared data-driven best practices for accelerating the transition from volume to value-based care with digital transformation.
Mr. Moag explained the importance of starting with a focused “test and learn” approach that solves a single problem with large ROI, such as care gap outreach or payer gap attestation. A common misstep that organizations make is over-indexing on desired features as opposed to desired outcomes, which can often slow deployments and in many cases, negatively impact outcomes. To avoid this, choose a partner that is equally focused on outcomes and committed to solving the core challenge of eliminating manual work – rather than simply shifting the work downstream.
Simplifying engagement for patients with the communication channels that patients are already using, such as text and email, can lower barriers to care. By activating digital engagement outside of standalone apps and portals, healthcare organizations can open the digital front door for their entire patient population – not just those who are digitally engaged.
Lastly, technology should expand the capacity of the workforce – freeing staff to deliver the highest quality care to each and every patient. “As a provider, I’ve seen how powerful end-to-end automation can be in empowering care teams to focus on patient care, instead of being bogged down with paperwork and data transfer,” shared Mr. Moag.
To learn how healthcare organizations can unlock growth goals by accelerating acquisition and retention with patient self-scheduling, listen to Notable’s webinar here.