Prioritizing Data Analytics, Value-Based Care Strategies at Nemours

Nemours Children’s prioritized improvements to its data analytics and value-based care strategies in 2021.

In 2021, Nemours Children’s Health, a pediatric health system in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida, took steps to improve its data analytics and value-based care strategies.

According to Nemours Director of Analytics and Technology for Population Health Alex Koster, much of 2021 was focused on using analytics and population identification to deliver vaccines to their patients.

“It was all about vaccines and population identification, both for our primary care operation. We used broad datasets to understand COVID vaccine rates for various age cohorts. We also took on population identification for high-risk kids for our specialties as well,” Koster told HealthITAnalytics.

Population identification uses data-driven methods to identify specific population subsets to assist healthcare organizations in creating better-tailored care to meet patient needs. It is an important aspect of population health management strategies.

In addition to vaccination efforts, the COVID-19 pandemic also highlighted the need for several data-oriented projects. According to Koster, Nemours is one year into implementing a social determinants of health screening tool and primary care method for their Delaware operations, which will expand across the organization.

Further expanding their research of social determinants of health, the organization is also working to create an equity dashboard that conducts data analysis on health equity and disparities, specifically focusing on access to care.

For the pediatric population, Nemours is also working on a collaborative effort with Colonial School District and the Delaware Health Information Network called the Dash Project.

“It’s going to allow us to leverage the encounter notification service of the HIE and the [Emergency Notification System] ENS in Delaware to receive notices when children have missed three or more days of school and send it to the PCPs,” Koster explained.

“We’re still in testing, so we’re looking to see if they are covering all the days of the week and the right kids. Then we’re going to start analyzing and implementing models so that our care coordinators can receive those alerts and reach out to families.”

In pursuing value-based care strategies, pediatrician and medical director for value-based care at Nemours, Jonathan Miller, MD, explained the organization has invested in data analytics and population health tools to advance medical management and care coordination.

“Our value-based care strategy has been to invest in the expertise, skills, and infrastructure at Nemours to allow us to be successful at engaging in innovative new alternative payment models with insurance companies,” Miller said.

By investing in analytic technology, Miller explained that Nemours is assisting both families in navigating the healthcare system and providing improved self-management of illnesses.

Moving forward in 2022, Nemours Children’s plans to continue improving its analytics and value-based care strategies.

“We’re working to incorporate additional data from our health information exchanges, particularly for our clinical integrated network partners. We can then provide the same level of high utilization analysis, much closer to real-time than what you can get with adjudicated claims,” Miller said.

“We’re going to be providing two tiers when we receive that data. One is to serve it up to our clinical teams and medical management teams, and the other is to aggregate it so we can do analysis to spot high utilizers or spot other trends.”

In October of 2021, Nemours Children’s announced a partnership with the Innovaccer Health Cloud to support value-based whole-person care. According to Koster, the health organization will carry on with the partnership to conduct preventive care analytics and continue assessing care gaps due to health disparities.

“It is definitely a big goal of ours in 2022 to make sure that we understand the equity impact of what we’re doing,” Koster said.