Blogs

The world of healthcare analytics is vast and can encompass a wide range of data that has the incredible potential to tell stories about health and healthcare delivery: right from individual patients to entire populations. Having numbers and an easy-to-use visualization at hand gives providers and caregivers the power not only to track the ongoing activities in their organizations. Simply showing visualizations are not enough and to fully understand their value, healthcare organizations have to take a few steps beyond basic graphs.

Race, gender, socioeconomic status have been known to affect a person’s health, access to care, costs incurred, and the outcomes. The defining conditions of how we live, learn, work, and play not only influences our health but goes on to define and impact an entire community’s health.

Amid the transition to value-based care, reimbursement for health care and tying it to quality and performance remains one of the major challenges in eradicating fee-for service models. According to a survey, only 41% of the physicians still placed their confidence in fee-for-service model for delivering patient outcomes.

Accountable care organizations, ever since they were brought on the frontlines have been promoting the delivery of accountable care all over the country and have been aiming to find a way that best aligns the organization’s performance with improvement measures and pursue the Triple Aim: improving the quality of care, with enhanced patient experience, while containing costs.

Over the past decades, healthcare has witnessed many trends, and a major one of those has been the movement of physicians from solo and independent practice models towards employed practice models, group practices, and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). However, there are many U.S. physicians that prefer to work in small practices: a study revealed that up until 2008, one-third of all physicians were solo practitioners, or have banded together to form Independent Practice Associations, or IPAs.

The MACRA rule proposed by the CMS includes a dual track Quality Payment Program and has many healthcare organizations considering their options. One of them is the much talked-about Merit-based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS and the other is Alternative Payment Models (APMs). APMs are being touted as an encouraging way to help the healthcare industry transition from fee-for-service to value-based care and improve the quality of care and contain costs. Despite some uncertainties, APMs are here to stay and will be a significant component in a value-based ecosystem.