Succeeding in Value-Based Care: Part 2 

Harnessing the Power of Data Aggregation for Value-Based Care 

Summary: To create data environments that support value-based care, healthcare organizations should standardize and centralize data, integrate it with existing data streams, implement analytics dashboards, and continuously monitor performance.

Welcome to the second post in our series on transforming healthcare operations to thrive in the value-based care environment. This series delves into the intricacies of transitioning to value-based delivery models, their challenges, and strategies to overcome them. Today, we focus on aggregating your patient data and transforming it into actionable insights. 

Transitioning to a value-based care model demands a cultural shift, robust data management, and application practices. The ability to aggregate patient data into a single location is fundamental for comprehensive and accurate reporting. This centralization facilitates a complete view of patient health, enabling healthcare providers to make informed decisions and improve patient outcomes. 

Below is a five-step approach to creating an environment that promotes continuous performance improvement through actionable insights. 

Start With Comprehensive Data Integration 

1. Establish Data Standards  

Before ingesting data from external sources, you’ll want to create data standards to ensure data integrity and consistency. Standardized data allows for accurate analysis, reporting, and decision-making. Without it, you can’t fully capitalize on information captured outside your organization. It also facilitates seamless integration and interoperability with other healthcare systems, reducing errors and redundancies. Finally, establishing data standards helps maintain compliance with regulatory requirements and makes report development much more straightforward.   

2. Ingest Data From External Sources 

Creating a comprehensive picture of a patient’s care requires a single source of truth. This can be done by aggregating data from various sources such as external electronic health records (EHRs), immunization registries, claims data, and wearable devices. By consolidating these disparate datasets into a single location, providers gain a holistic view of patients’ health, which is essential for accurate diagnoses and personalized treatment plans. Data aggregation also allows for more precise reporting, which helps identify patterns and trends and supports data submission for quality-based programs.   

3. Ensure External Data Is Referenceable 

Once you have your data collected and formatted appropriately, you need to incorporate it into existing data streams so that it appears natively alongside similar data within the patient’s chart and can be referenced the same as data initially collected within the EHR. This makes it easy for providers to gain a comprehensive view of the patient’s needs and background and allows you to create more accurate reports and precise clinical decision support functionality.  

Then Focus on Making Your Data Actionable 

4. Implement Analytics To Monitor Performance at Multiple Levels  

Now that you have your data, you need to share it with people in leadership in a meaningful way. Creating separate tools tailored to executives, directors, managers, and providers allows them access to real-time insights to enable proactive decision-making. You also need to be able to summarize your data at the organizational, departmental, and individual levels. Presenting easily digestible data tailored to the viewer is the easiest way to promote timely interventions that enhance care quality and improve quality-based performance metrics. 

5. Operationalize Your Dashboards 

Now that you have a governance structure and the data necessary to monitor performance, it’s time to combine them. You need to establish a dedicated team to continuously analyze your metrics, pinpoint specific areas for improvement, and develop solutions. This team is your catalyst to change and will help coordinate improvement efforts involving IT, operations, and clinicians. Creating a cyclical evaluation, action, and reassessment process ensures that strategies are continually refined and that you’re always improving.

The transition to value-based care is a multifaceted journey that requires a solid foundation of accurate and complete data. By centralizing patient data and leveraging provider-facing dashboards, healthcare organizations can enhance reporting accuracy, improve patient outcomes, and drive efficiency. As we continue to explore strategies for effective and patient-centered healthcare systems, stay tuned for our next post on aligning your care models with your value-based goals.