Embracing Healthcare IT to Drive Effective Clinical Integration

I recently listened to a great webinar, in which Jennifer Endicott, VP of Clinical Integration at Orlando Health, shared how the organization is embracing healthcare IT to drive effective clinical integration. Her story included several best practices and a fantastic overview of key industry topics, so I thought it would be important to share a summary if you haven’t seen it…

Orlando Health, a community-based, not-for-profit health system, serves a population of 2 million residents in Central Florida – not to mention the 50+ million visitors that the area sees annually. The health system needed a way to keep track of the patients that were coming in for care, as well as those that were slipping through the cracks. Orlando Health also has a strong focus on creating a “Patient-First clinically integrated model of care” that represents who it wants to be as a system in the future: an outcomes-driven, value-focused provider that offers the highest quality, lowest cost care in the market.

Tackling a New Model of Care

In the new model of care, we know healthcare systems must shift their strategies from a traditional, reactive care environment to an ACO strategy across clinically integrated networks. For Orlando Health, it had too many process running across various registries to handle the load of tracking multiple chronic conditions and measures simultaneously. The health system just didn’t have enough time or budget to hire staff to scale this model and needed to automate these processes.

Phytel brought enterprise care management to Orlando Health, enabling the health system to manage all of its patients, not just those coming in, using real-time data. Care coordinators are now able to use the system to obtain any given set of measures and identify gaps of care, as well as assess patient compliance for chronic conditions.

In addition, Orlando Health was able to engage disparate providers through a robust clinical integration plan, leveraging mechanisms to monitor utilization, control costs, and assure quality of care in their population health management efforts across the care continuum. To achieve clinical integration, Orlando Health focused on three key areas: scaling the ACO infrastructure, enabling care management, and patient-first population engagement.

Phytel helped the healthcare system by analyzing its workflow requirements to ensure it captured the data points needed for reporting. Specifically within the context of ACO 33 measures, Orlando Health found that it was critically important to collaborate with a vendor that helped them understand the workflow processes to be able to do that.

Realizing New Opportunities

Automated outreach represented a bigger opportunity than Orlando Health originally saw, enabling the health system to take population health management to the next level through managing transitions of care. By offloading burdens of the care management process to automated processes, it resulted in less money spent on internal resources, and more time freed up for care teams.

Outreach efforts also improved patient engagement. In one example, primary care physicians reported difficulty in getting patients to bring their medications to their visits. A scripted medication reminder was then added in an automated communication to patients, and physicians saw a remarkable increase in the number of patients who brought in their medications. Through automated outreaches, Orlando Health is now able to get messages out in real-time to help patients improve the level of care that’s delivered to them.