A View Into the World of LTPAC at the PointClickCare Summit

November 2, 2022
John Lynn
7 Min Read

As we continue our ongoing coverage of Fall Health IT conferences, I’m happy this week to finally being able to attend the PointClickCare Summit.  I’ve been invited for a long time, but the timing never worked out.  If you’re not familiar with PointClickCare, then you probably don’t work in the LTPAC space.  They’re kind of like the Epic of LTPAC.  I’m excited to be educated on the unique realities that LTPAC faces.  Although, after hearing today’s opening keynote, many of the issues in LTPAC are very similar to acute care with slight twists.

Here’s a look at some of the key insights and perspectives from the opening keynote of the PointClickCare Summit.

As has been the theme at other user conferences we’ve attended this year, the keynote was packed. This picture doesn’t show the hundreds of people standing in the back of the opening. Needless to say, user conferences are still doing well and valued by attendees.

Dave Wessinger, Co-Founder and CEO of PointClickCare, and Mike Wessinger, Co-founder and Executive Chair of PointClickCare’s Board of Directors, kicked off the conference. While there was a lot of gratitude for being back together, it was also great to see the transition of leadership that happened on stage. Plus, it led right to discussion of their acquisitions of Collective Medical and Audacious Inquiry which highlights the importance of bridging the gap between post acute care and acute care.

Something we’ve noted at Healthcare IT Today is the number of vendors that were interested in the LTPAC space. It was great to see that PointClickCare had 89 partners at their user conference too. Seems like LTPAC is really investing in technology as the path forward.

Needless to say, LTPAC has been through a lot thanks to COVID. It will be interesting to hear from more organizations about their experience and how things are today. It’s good to hear there were some wins along the way, but that really feels like a silver lining. The challenges most of these organizations have faced the past couple years is tough to understand.

One of those wins may be the increased awareness by politicians and regulators about the industry. Although, there’s certainly more work to be done since more regulation is likely coming.

Much of the crisis talked about by these organizations has to do with staffing. Although, it was also pointed out that acute care isn’t all that different with small margins and staffing issues.

When you think of these organizations that are kind of beaten and bruised from everything that’s happened, it must be a relief to hear this idea of simplicity from your EHR vendor.

I’ll be interested to hear if others agree that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Given how hard it has been the past couple years, it’s hard to imagine it being worse.

One of the big themes of the opening keynote was connecting the post acute care with the acute care providers. The drop in readmissions and revenue associated with that is a big reason why.

Communication is at the core of helping to solve this issue. Whether that’s sharing data or actually communicating person to person through asynchronous messaging, it’s making an impact for good.

I’m interested to hear if others agree with this view. Is the data digital now and it’s just not shared? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The shift to sharing data was clear on stage. The idea of being a subscriber of data for a certain patient or a contributor of data is a good one. I think we’ll see more of this thinking across all of healthcare.

While many look at Pharma and Life Sciences as the evil empire, it made a lot of sense why PointClickCare would partner with life sciences organizations who need access to real-world data on the senior populations who take their drugs. I expect this will yield some good results for patients.

The opening session talked quite a bit about the move to risk bearing and value based care. Their product they internally call Pacman and seems to have derived from the Collective Medical acquisition helps post acute care providers to bridge the gap to their acute care partners. I love that they’re making this “automagically” happen using the data inside PointClickCare.

Another piece of this is in agreements with acute care. Acute care obviously wants a great price from their post acute care providers. Post acute care wants to share in the upside benefit acute care receives for reducing readmissions. However, you can’t have this conversation without the data and tech.

Everyone is looking at value based care including post acute care. I think we’re going to have to all partner to make it happen. It’s complicated.

No doubt, post acute care faces some interesting challenges. COVID wasn’t really friendly to them, but it’s amazing to see the resilience that these organizations are still displaying as they do their best to care for patients. As they wrapped up the opening session, the question was asked if any other industry had provided more value at a lower cost than the people in that room have done for patients. He’s probably right. I’m excited to learn more from this unique community.

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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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