[T]he state’s largest accountable care organization is partnering with Vermont Information Technology Leaders to collect and analyze data on population health.
OneCare Vermont said it would analyze the data as part of a move “to a predictive phase where at-risk patients are identified early and interventions can be made before diseases progress to critical states.”
OneCare is a health care reform entity formed under the Affordable Care Act that allows large groups of doctors to join together to take responsibility for the health of their patients and coordinate their care. OneCare is currently responsible for about 100,000 patients.
VITL is a publicly funded nonprofit that warehouses data from electronic medical records across the state. It runs the Vermont Health Information Exchange, designed to share digital medical records among systems.
As part of the new project, VITL has figured out how to tag information coming into its data warehouse if it relates to any of OneCare’s 100,000 patients. The filtering process creates a special set of data for OneCare, updated daily, that it can use to determine what care its patients are getting and if they’re getting healthier.
“(OneCare) can drill down on the data and look at specific factors around diabetes, for instance, or they can drill down and look at how patients are doing with congestive heart failure,” said Rob Gibson, the vice president of marketing and business development for VITL.
Gibson said the project has been in the works for about 18 months and that he hopes it has already created a strong partnership between the two entities. VITL uses a similar sort of partnership to facilitate another statewide reform project, called the Blueprint for Health, he said.
“The analytics capability of this system will allow us to engage with patients in new and exciting ways,” said Dr. Norman Ward, the chief medical officer for OneCare, in a statement. “In order to improve patient outcomes, we must get to the point where we engage people as early as possible.”
Todd Moore, the chief executive officer of OneCare, said: “Data is the fuel for the engine of coordinated care. As an ACO, we have to understand what happens to our patients across a connected health care system, to make sure we meet all their needs and see opportunities for improved care.”
The project was developed through a so-called SIM grant, which Vermont received through the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2013. OneCare and VITL have an agreement to pay for the project’s maintenance and operations.
