Value-Based Care is Coming: How to Create a Culture of Quality at Your Hospital

If there’s a recurring theme in healthcare today it’s that of constant change. Other industries are disrupted by new innovative technologies and approaches to customer engagement, but add government regulations, payer models, and the fickleness of government administrations, and healthcare is at a whole new level of unpredictability. But there’s one thing for certain in this industry-in-flux: value-based care is coming—and it’s coming faster than some health systems are ready for.

In a recent survey from the American College of Healthcare executives, hospital CEOs ranked “Financial Worries”, “Governmental Mandates”, and “Patient Safety and Quality” as the top issues affecting their hospitals. Unsurprisingly, many of the specific concerns within each issue related back to value-based readiness. Since payments in a fully value-based world will be structured around quality, I want to hone in on some specific concerns hospital CEOs have around their issue number three: Patient Safety and Quality.

Patient Safety and Quality

Healthcare executives can’t control the timeliness, sufficiency, and unpredictability of government reimbursements, but they can control quality and safety improvements within their hospitals.

Here are some of the top specific concerns hospital CEOs listed under patient safety and quality:

• Engaging clinicians in improving the culture of quality and safety (56%)
• Engaging clinicians in reducing clinically unnecessary tests and procedures (51%)
• Redesigning care processes (50%)

So, how do you engage clinicians in the culture of quality?

Administrative oversight, quality score-carding after the fact, and endless meetings hammer clinician moral. In fact, a recent report out of Harvard, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association has deemed physician burnout a public health crisis. The last thing they need is additional oversight from hospital administrators.

Embedding quality care considerations in the existing clinical workflow is essential.

Specifically, health systems need to ensure that accurate, complete diagnostic coding (especially for comorbidities), and guideline-based clinical action are all in the daily routine of the members of the care team.

But that’s not easy, either. Clinical guidelines change. New therapeutics are constantly introduced. Each patient’s needs are unique. Each patient’s record is unique. And patient data isn’t necessarily presented in a way that makes making the best decisions for their care simple.

Give Your Clinicians Clear, Actionable Patient Data

Making sure each patient gets the right treatment at the right time can only happen if all relevant patient data is easily accessible to the clinician, not just the pop health team. Take a patient with type 2 diabetes, for example. In a typical electronic health record, it might take a physician upwards of 16 clicks to review important guideline-based data points to make the right clinical decisions – latest A1c, latest cholesterol, latest blood pressure, last foot exam to screen for neuropathy, last eye exam to screen for retinopathy, current active medications, latest labs. They might have to flip through a manual logbook—or consumer-facing app that’s disconnected from their workflow—to review how a patient has been doing with their blood-glucose levels. And once they’ve viewed all that, they’re supposed to know—quickly—the right adjustments to the treatment plan. The right advice.

Rimidi’s solution aggregates relevant patient data from the patient record and connected devices (like a Continuous Glucose Monitor), and works directly within the EHR using SMART on FHIR standards, giving physicians a more complete view of their patients’ health without complicating their workflow.

Enable Remote Patient Monitoring

Aggregated relevant data is great, but there still isn’t a lot of time during patient visits to review the information and make an informed decision. Rimidi enables remote patient-provider communication, allowing clinicians to offer care across the continuum and prompt clinical action where necessary.

Other members of the care team can view an entire patient panel of individuals onboarded to Rimidi, see who is “high” risk according to configurable clinical targets, and remotely send treatment adjustments—or even just reminders or encouragement.

Present Guideline-based Decision Support Within the Clinician Workflow

Let’s take another look at the specific concern from the ACHE survey: Engaging clinicians in reducing clinically unnecessary tests and procedures. I certainly don’t think clinicians are purposefully ordering unnecessary tests and procedures. I think they’re doing the best they can with the way patient data is currently presented to them and with their lack of time to spend with each patient.

Rimidi’s solution embeds clinical decision support tools based on the latest guidelines and each individual patient’s data. In other words, we make it easy for the physician to do the right thing for their patient, and hard to do the wrong—or unnecessary—thing.

Rimidi: Time for Better

At Rimidi, we recognize clinician frustrations around a lack of actionable data and, quite frankly, a lack of time. We know the clinician point of view because we were founded by clinicians, and we created our software with a physician’s lens and an underlying belief that we can do better as a healthcare system.

If you would like a demo of our solution, contact us at info@rimidi.com with the subject line “Demo Request”.