Premier Offers ACO Roadmap
Experts from 28 health systems have developed an industry standard information management capability road map for coordinating accountable care, outlining the IT capabilities that will be required “to support the evolution of organizations from the current fragmented, transaction-oriented care delivery model to a fully coordinated accountable care model,” according to the Premier healthcare alliance.
The organization’s Accountable Care Implementation Collaborative members will leverage the model to shape their decisions on what technology they need to implement, and the sequence in which they need to bring that technology into their organizations.
Collaborative members have developed a phased approach that, according to Premier, ultimately will lead to seamless accountable care coordination and clinical integration through the following “levels of maturity:”
- Transaction – IT supporting individual providers in delivering care and measuring outcomes.
- Interaction – Basic care coordination capabilities with initial population-based metrics.
- Integration – Care coordination capabilities improve, and health status measurement is possible.
- Collaboration – Seamless care coordination with demonstrable improvement in population health status.
- Transformation – Realize across the population the Triple Aim goals of improving the health of the population, enhancing the patient care experience and controlling the per capita cost of care.
Each stage incorporates capabilities specific to transaction management, integration and the analytics necessary to support coordinated care delivery models, states Premier. Within each stage there are specific IT-enabled capabilities identified as critical to success in that level of maturity. Different organizations are at differing levels of maturity, but to deliver accountable care the work group believes that organizations will need to achieve the Transformation level.
IBM and Premier are developing a technology platform that will support this model to improve population health. “It will allow hospitals, doctors and other health providers to work together to enhance patient safety while reducing the overuse of procedures, readmissions, unnecessary ER visits and hospital-acquired conditions,” according to Premier.
The CIOs and CMIOs who developed the guidelines are part of the Collaborative’s Population Health Data Management (PHDM) work group. The Accountable Care Implementation Collaborative currently includes 28 health systems with more than 120 hospitals and 5,000 physicians providing care for 1.5 million patients across 23 states.
Dale Sanders says
Excellent post, Anthony and compliments to Premier. This is the type of roadmap that should have been produced by ONC and preceded the EMR Meaningful Use land rush. It should be adopted as the strategic road map for every healthcare CIO in the industry, and every Enterprise IT vendor should do the same– yesterday.
Herb Smaltz says
Yep – agree with Dale’s comments. I’m a big Stephen Covey fan (begin with the end in mind). Knowing what data/information/knowledge is needed to empower workers at all levels of an organization to spot patterns in their own operations, sense patterns in the marketplace and have an end-to-end view of all of the relevant, revenue producing, cost impacting, quality improving/declining processes within and beyond their four walls should have been “the end” we had in mind. This is a nicely laid out framework to help get to a solid “end state”. Kudos.