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?