The Role of Health Maintenance in Value-Based Care
Health maintenance plans may be one of the best examples of value-based care we see in healthcare today. The entire concept of these plans is to maintain or improve patients’ health to provide better outcomes and avoid costlier procedures later.
Common examples of health maintenance include various types of cancer screenings, physicals, eye exams, and other types of preventative work. If one of these activities raises concerns for a clinician, patients can be put on regimens to control or avoid an illness. Healthcare organizations routinely screen for signs of pre-diabetes and can consequently offer meal/exercise plans, medications, and other recommendations for patients rather than waiting for diabetes to manifest before offering a solution.
It’s an intuitive concept. I’d rather have a clinician tell me to strengthen my bones than have them fix a broken one.
Seen in this way, health maintenance is at its most effective when it combines both preventative efforts and mitigation plans in a consistent and continuous manner. It’s clear that this will lead to better patient outcomes, but it also creates earlier and more predictable revenue streams for hospitals. This makes health maintenance plans a great fit for value-based care programs.
The rise of alternative payment models like value-based care have grown considerably as well. While individual value-based care initiatives have shown mixed results, the model as a whole shows promise for all participants in the healthcare lifecycle.
Adoption of value-based care programs has been accelerating across stakeholders. US health plans surveyed by PwC reported that they were up to 60% participation in value-based care in 2020 from 11% less than a decade earlier. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services plan to have value-based care relationships in place for Medicare beneficiaries by 2030 and are rolling out targeted programs where value-based care adoption is low.
The problem that many healthcare organizations encounter is that data about their patients can come from disparate sources. New patients can be even more complicated with disorganized referral packets and results that are posted to a patient’s medical record as an image file. Valuable data that would indicate a patient’s need for a health maintenance plan is often stuck within these files, requiring tedious manual data entry to be of any clinical use.
What hospitals are doing instead is using Extract’s automation software to manage these documents. Referral packets can be completely classified and organized however your physicians find them most effective. Discrete results can be identified and delivered to the EMR by document type from the referral packet or any other source of non-interfaced documentation.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can deliver the data needed to provide more complete care for your patients while cutting data entry costs, please send us a note or give us a call and we’d be happy to have a brief conversation or give you a personalized demo of our solution.
