Care management platforms can be like that phone you’ve had for a few years. You need to install software updates to keep your phone running, but it wasn’t made to accommodate these updates — quite the dilemma. Eventually, these updates slow your phone down to a point where just unlocking it is a frustrating ordeal.
Comprehensive care management platforms require a lot of extra parts to provide the necessary functions — and these parts don’t always work well together. They end up complicating care rather than simplifying it. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that 64% of healthcare executives with electronic health records EHRs say they have failed to deliver the critical tools needed for value-based care (VBC).
Find out what a quality Chronic Care Management platform contains with this checklist.
How do you keep your organization from getting caught up with a problematic care management platform? Look for a system with three things:
Robust Administration:
In modern healthcare, organizations that were once separate must work together. Hospitals coordinate with independent practices, visiting nurse associations, mental health centers — the list goes on. How can fundamentally different organizations communicate and collaborate effectively? Advanced administrative controls are the key.
An ideal care management platform allows program leaders — a nurse coordinator for example — to do two things:
- set up permissions and controls to information so they can share what’s needed to deliver care in real-time. This person should have the ability to set up the care team from their organization all the way to an in-home nurse without being granted access to information that’s inappropriate for their role.
- Delegating tasks must be possible without having to go back to the vendor or programmers — or to anybody with particular technical skills. To accommodate this, the interface should be user-friendly.
Interoperable Care Delivery:
We’ve touched on this, but you want the care management platform to be able to run complex sets of tasks that are not easily accomplished in a traditional EHR system.
To do this effectively, you need a system that can collect data on individuals. The data should come from EMRs, administrative systems, claims information — whatever provides meaningful insight. The important thing is your system collects data with a sense of purpose.
The goal is to use this data to provide relevant assessments tailored to the individual. They should help you discover exactly what is wrong with an individual, provide the necessary steps to manage the problem, and delegate those tasks to the correct individuals.
Comprehensive Data:
This is referring to data as a whole and how it can be utilized — not specifically in terms of how it affects an individual. The system should aggregate data and utilize it for whatever back-end purposes — analytics, evaluation, generating new insights, and more.
The system should combine automatically taken data with manual data and have the power to convert it into a structured high-quality format. With this information, you can provide valuable insights to other business intelligence systems, analytics systems, or use the data for routine evaluations to drive quality improvement.
The Bottom-line:
All care management platforms are NOT created equal. However, finding one that’s a step above the rest can be challenging. Avoid the trap by looking for a comprehensive care management platform that combines robust administration functionality with versatile data warehouse capabilities to provide the optimal care delivery experience. If you’re interested in providing efficient VBC, contact us today.
