What’s Your Value Based Care Strategy? What Role Does IT Play?

I pretty regularly take a look at various healthcare IT whitepapers to glean insights into what’s happening in the industry and what advice vendors are offering healthcare organizations. I’ve been keeping a special eye on the changing reimbursement model and move to value based care and so I was interested in this whitepaper titled “How to Win with Value-based Care: Developing Your Practice’s EHR Strategy.”

The whitepaper starts with a dive into some of the changing care and reimbursement models that are emerging in healthcare. Then they offer this 4 step “Winning Strategy” for being ready for these changes:
Step 1: Assess your current situation
Step 2: Develop a customized VBC Plan that’s right for your practice
Step 3: Determine IT solution needs
Step 4: Implementation

In many ways, this 4 step plan could be applied to any project. Of course, the whitepaper dives into a lot more detail for each step. Although, I was struck by step 3. It takes for granted that value based reimbursement will require an IT solution. This whitepaper comes from a healthcare IT company with some value based IT product offerings so you have to question whether IT will be at the core of a practice’s value based care strategy or not.

As I think about the future of coordinated care and value based reimbursement, I think it’s more than fair to say that technology will be at the center of these initiatives. Value based care requires data to prove the quality of the care you’re providing. Certainly you could try and collect some of this data on paper, but does anyone think this is reasonable?

Try identifying all overweight patients in your patient population using paper chats. I can see in my mind’s eye an army of medical records professionals sifting through stacks of paper charts. It’s not a pretty solution and it’s fraught with error. That’s one query on an EHR system.

One of the biggest elements of value based reimbursement will be communication with patients. Can we build that real time communication on the back of snail mail? It sounds almost silly talking about it. Of course we’re going to use mobile devices, secure messages, and even secure video communication. We still have A LOT of work to do in this regard, but it’s the future.

Of course technology is going to be at the core of value based reimbursement. It’s the only way to accomplish what we’re striving to accomplish. The next question is: will the EHR make this possible or are we going to need something new and more advanced?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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