Lessons from 3M’s Executive Summit: New care delivery models

March 4, 2016 / By Ann Chenoweth, MBA, RHIA, FAHIMA

With the transition from volume to value-based delivery of care, health systems are exploring innovative models to improve the quality of care and patient safety while reducing costs.

Last week, we heard about some of these initiatives at our biannual Summit for healthcare executives in Park City, UT. This Summit brings together executives from many of the largest health systems throughout the United States to discuss issues they face and how 3M can help them achieve their organizational goals. Throughout the three-day Summit, some common themes emerged:

• Developing a systematic approach to enterprise care management and coordination to ensure patients receive the “right care, at the right time and in the right place.”
• Creating service lines to rapidly develop and disseminate best practices, monitor quality, and manage increasingly complex payment models
• Exploring technology to provide physicians with clinical documentation support and real-time guidance at the point of care, regardless of care setting – particularly to capture all HCCs
• Moving care to outpatient settings and growing their provider network – especially for primary care.

As health systems take on more risk, integrated data is needed from multiple sources (claims, lab, EHR, etc.) across multiple sites of care in order to effectively reduce cost and increase quality.

• Analytics tools are needed for integrated surveillance, predictive and retrospective analysis
• Quality reporting in real-time with ability to take action proactively is key
• Clinical data is not always available requiring health systems to be overly reliant on claims data
• Information governance is essential to ensure data integrity regardless of care setting and provider.

I walked away from this Summit with many key takeaways including the accelerated need for outcomes driven care coordination across the care continuum. Actionable data is critical for success and vendor agnostic analytics tools will be required to structure, normalize and standardize data across disparate entities so a longitudinal view of the patient care can be accomplished. Documentation that accurately reflects the quality and scope of care provided is also an essential component. Physician tools that facilitate timely and accurate clinical documentation can assist in the transition from volume to value.  

Ann Chenoweth is Director of Industry Relations for 3M Health Information Systems.