Closing Care Gaps at the Point-of-Care Yields 4X Value Realization

CLOSING CARE GAPS INCREASES THE QUALITY OF PATIENT CARE

PCPs spend more than half their workday—nearly six hours each day—interacting with the EHR.¹ However, estimates suggest PCPs would need to spend more than 20 hours a day on providing all the acute, chronic, and preventative care for a panel of 2,500 patients.² CHNw, an integrated healthcare system, is dedicated to continuous improvement and closing care gaps for the patients it serves.

REDUCING BURDENSOME DOCUMENTATION PROCESSES

CHNw was committed to ensuring patients received appropriate primary and preventative care and to succeed in value-based care. Still, burdensome documentation processes in the EHR made closing care gaps and improving performance difficult. Data about care gaps were not embedded at the point of care, requiring providers and office staff to spend precious time manually searching the EHR to find the data of interest. The organization needed a solution that would allow it to reduce the administrative burden on its providers and office staff, help in closing care gaps, and improve value-based care performance.

DATA AND ANALYTICS HELP UNCOVER AND CLOSE CARE GAPS

CHNw leveraged the Health Catalyst® Data Operating System (DOS™) platform and a robust suite of analytics applications, including the Health Catalyst Embedded Care Gaps™ application, to make care gaps visible to providers within their workflow, decrease the administrative burden on care teams, and improve value-based care performance.

The Embedded Care Gaps application is a fully EHR-embedded patient-visit solution powered by the Health Catalyst MeasureAble™ application, including a world-class rules engine, providing tailored patient information to providers at the point of care. With this application, agendas for each visit are automated, and actionable procedure orders are pre-populated, reducing the time providers must spend searching for care gap data, and decreasing the number of clicks providers must perform to place orders and document the care provided. When providers open the patient visit in the EHR, the application presents them with automated decision support for each patient’s care gaps so providers can accurately prep for, then efficiently manage, the visit with minimal effort.

CHNw uses the analytics application to easily track and measure performance and reporting requirements year-round, assisting in closing care gaps and improving contract performance before measure deadlines.

RESULTS

CHNw leveraged Embedded Care Gaps to provide critical information to providers at the point of care. The organization has improved provider workflow, increased provider satisfaction, closed thousands of care gaps, and improved value-based care performance—all at a fraction of the cost that would have been required for EHR tool development.

Providers using the Embedded Care Gaps application closed more care gaps and generated more revenue than providers that weren’t using the application. Results from just ten percent of providers using the application include:

• >373K care gaps closed in just six months.
• 4X value realization.

CHNw evaluated the impact of Embedded Care Gaps on patient lives and provider workflow and satisfaction. An additional consideration in evaluating the initiative is the benefits achieved from a revenue perspective versus the application costs. CHNw’s evaluation netted a 4X value realization.

“In just six months, we realized 4X value from the Health Catalyst Embedded Care Gaps™ application.”

Patrick McGill, MD, Executive Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer, Community Health Network

WHAT’S NEXT

CHNw plans to expand the Embedded Care Gaps application to all its providers to ensure they have the information they need within their workflows to close care gaps and effectively and efficiently improve care quality and improve value-based contract performance.

REFERENCES

1. Arndt, B. G., et al. (2017). Tethered to the EHR: Primary care physician workload assessment using EHR event log data and time-motion observations. Annals of Family Medicine 15(5), 419-426. Retrieved from https://www.annfammed.org/content/15/5/419.full
2. Altschuler, J., et al. (2012). Estimating a reasonable patient panel size for primary care physicians with team-based task delegation. Annals of Family Medicine, 10(5), 396–400. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3438206/

ADDITIONAL READING

• Close Gaps in Patient Care with the Health Catalyst Embedded Care Gaps™ Application
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• Consistent Improvement Methodology Accelerates Healthcare Outcomes