Interview with Dana Sellers: Encore Pay for Perfomance (P4P) Managed Services

The following is an interview with Dana Sellers, CEO of Encore Health Resources about their new Pay for Performance Managed Services offering which they’ll be sharing at HIMSS 2014.
Dana Sellers
Tell us your vision for how your new P4P Managed Services will work.
Our vision is to help our clients manage performance and data components against payer contracts to maximize quality, obtain incentives, and avoid penalties. Our offering uses a combination of Encore subject-matter experts (SMEs), software tools, and methodologies that we’ve already tested and proven in large healthcare systems. P4P Managed Services lifts the burden of meeting these value-based demands off our clients’ shoulders and into Encore’s hands. As part of this innovative offering, we also share risks and rewards via multi-year partnerships. We work with clients to ensure that they have the trusted data they need to support performance improvement and obtain incentives.

Our service begins with the P4P Value-driven Roadmap, which identifies the dollars and associated measures at stake in clients’ at-risk, value-based contracts — including projections for the next few years. As input for the roadmap, we perform a data assessment of a client’s EHR and other source systems to determine if they are capturing the right data for the targeted measures. The roadmap defines the multi-year data and process program required to obtain the desired incentives.

Next, we establish this required program along with data governance, technology, and data tools. We also build the value components of the program, including EHR remediation, workflow redesign, change management, data profiling, ETL, and dashboards required to monitor performance.

Once the program foundation is established, the value-management cycle begins. Encore monitors each client’s performance, providing insight through performance analysis and suggesting needed performance improvements to meet all targeted incentives and enhance the quality of care. Also, as new contracts emerge, we work with clients to incorporate new eMeasures into the program.

By creating trusted, transparent data, Encore helps health systems transform and meet new payment-model requirements by using eMeasures to adhere to evidence-based standards. The result is better patient care and an improved bottom line. We provide the consulting expertise, unique methodologies, and our own, in-house developed software tools to help our clients succeed — as we’ve proven by our results in helping other large clients accelerate their achievements through eMeasures.

Why did you choose to offer a service like this?
We know EHR data! Our methodologies and software tools are built around EHR data and eMeasures.

Encore was founded to provide consulting services with a focus on analytics fueled by clinical data. In the broad spectrum of consulting services that we provide – from HIT and clinical advisory to implementation, go-live services, and analytics — our focus is trained on identifying and gathering the data that our clients need to improve healthcare and operational performance. Therefore, our P4P Managed Services offering is a natural extension of our mission. At-risk contracts require the ability to track eMeasures, which has been an Encore strength – and differentiator — since our founding five years ago.

Our vision for P4P Managed Services is also supported by our clients – especially CIOs and CFOs. They have told us that they need assistance with all aspects of data capture, analytics, and performance improvement. When we lift that burden from our clients’ shoulders, it frees them to focus on other critical issues, such as cost reduction, while we leverage our unique expertise and proven experience to manage the value side of the equation.

Which P4P programs do you see Encore supporting?
We support measures — quality measures that go back to incentives. These include Medicare, Medicaid, commercial P4P/Fee-for-Value type contracts, IQR, PQRS, ACO, ACAs, ACCs, NQF/CQMs, PCMH, PCQUS, clinically integrated networks, and the like.

Our methodology and tools tie the eMeasures directly to workflow, so we know how to change each client’s workflow to get better results. Our knowledge bases include over 350 eMeasures.

How much of this offering is technical and how much of it is services.
This is an important question. Encore is first and foremost a services company – a services company that is strongly differentiated by unmatched, in-house-developed software solutions that are uniquely designed to support the services we provide. So our new offering is precisely that: services supported by innovative technology and processes on a flexible, as-needed basis.

What does the cost structure look like for this service?
As described earlier, the P4P Managed Services cost structure is based upon a roadmap we define with each client to quantify the value-based, at-risk dollars and the client’s capabilities to manage the quality-performance components of their at-risk contracts. Contract details, therefore, will vary with each client’s situation. The bottom line is that Encore is willing to manage our P4P Managed Services contracts while working with clients to define a risk-sharing arrangement that incents everyone to achieve.

Why would an organization choose to outsource the P4P to Encore as opposed to doing it in-house?
The process of managing performance against eMeasures across a health system is complex, and many clients have not put together a disciplined approach to performance improvement. Further, many of our clients are telling us that they simply do not have the full complement of expertise, resources, technology, and program-management disciplines available to move fast enough against a dizzying array of government and commercial at-risk contracts. But we do, and we – especially our skilled eMeasures experts — have a track record that proves it.

Also, an increasing number of health systems are recognizing that they’ll have to enter a world of eMeasures that is growing every year. With P4P Managed Services, we bring the expertise, skills, tools, and methodology that can take this eMeasure world and our clients under our wing. Our new service provides clients the breathing room to focus on multiple fronts simultaneously – and not leave any dollars on the table as a result.

A third reason for choosing our new offering is because it’s a cost-conscious solution. We eliminate the need for clients to hire more architects, eMeasures specialists, analysts, and report builders.

Finally, P4P Managed Services can preserve endangered species. That is, we supplement our clients’ existing IT department with some of the hardest resources to find: clinicians and operational SMEs with an understanding of data; eMeasures experts; and, technical SMEs with an understanding of the clinical and the operational worlds.

How much accountability is Encore taking on with these P4P Managed Services? Where do you draw the line?
Our new offering is a full life-cycle solution that we approach as a partnership. We nail down the amount of accountability – the risk that we’re able to share – on a case-by-case basis through the roadmap. Depending upon what we learn, we then determine the degree of accountability that both we and our clients can share to incent the highest levels of achievement.

Is there some risk on Encore’s part that the client will fall short on what they need to accomplish for Encore to provide the P4P services? Encore can’t go in and do the documentation for the doctor.
This is precisely what our new service is in place to define. As with every engagement, we use a thorough, careful assessment process to ascertain the nature of the challenges involved. With P4P Managed Services, that means understanding:
• The incentives involved
• The risk involved if our clients can’t achieve optimal revenue reimbursement – say with Medicare and Medicaid contracts
• The risk involved for Encore if those contractual incentives are not earned
Bottom line: we both win, or we both lose. With P4P managed services, we are convinced that we can define on a case-by-case basis the mix of Encore services, solutions, and client resources that Encore will manage to produce a win or multiple wins for both sides.

This feels similar to revenue cycle management (RCM) applied to P4P programs. Can you apply some of the RCM learnings to this type of offering?
Yes, similarities do exist between RCM and the management of quality performance components of at-risk contracts. The way we see it, RCM has been responsible for collecting patient data and getting claims ready for a long time. It remains fairly unchanged and encompasses the management of people, processes, and technology across health systems to improve revenue collection. By tying eMeasures to clinical rather than latent claims data, performance issues can be corrected within a few days. That is because the use of EHR data literally “moves the needle” in real time. Beyond claims data, we use EHR clinical data to affect change that meets the required quality measures thresholds.

At present, there is an increased focus on traditional cost monitoring, which informs RCM. This typically happens at the service line and department level; not at the episode-of-care level. Although direct, indirect, fixed, and ad-hoc costs are certainly important and are included, value-based cost control and reduction efforts must focus on the clinical processes, just like the quality performance components. Both will require tracking the costs and quality across the entire continuum of care, constantly analyzing performance and applying adjustments. And the revenue cycle is a significant piece of this. So the discipline and techniques needed for RCM can certainly inform a health system’s approach to fee-for-value focused management.

Do you see this as the start of offering even more Managed Services offerings?
Yes. We are now working on another offering – it’s in the packaging stages – around Meta-Data Management. Stay tuned for more details later this year.

About the author

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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