Value-Based Care is Improving Chronic Disease Management
Provider organizations are fashioning together robust value-based care strategies to support chronic disease management, an Insights by Xtelligent Healthcare Media report finds.
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- Nearly two-thirds of providers see value-based care as a way to improve relationships with patients and enhance care management strategies, according to reporting from Insights by Xtelligent Healthcare Media.
Currently, chronic diseases are the most severe threat to health in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that chronic and mental health conditions are responsible for 90 percent of the country’s annual healthcare expenditures.
With six in ten adults having one chronic disease and four in ten adults having two or more prior to the coronavirus pandemic, chronic disease management has become one of the essential focal points for healthcare organizations working to close care gaps and promote proactive care management.
Insights by Xtelligent Healthcare Media conducted a stakeholder survey and several interviews to learn more about organizational approaches to combatting chronic diseases.
In one follow-up interview, a care coordinator explained the crucial benefit of value-based care. “Some of the outliers can’t be addressed in chronic disease management,” the respondent said. “But value-based care is making people proactive rather than reactive.”
To manage complex patient populations, organizations of all sizes rely on some form of technology. However, over one-third of survey respondents indicated that ineffective patient-centered solutions, unreliable alert notifications, and problems initiating proactive treatments were common challenges associated with health IT.
“When someone with a chronic issue comes to our office for whatever reason, and their clinic was slow to transfer files, we end up having to reinvent the wheel,” commented one pediatrician.
This lack of interoperability can result in higher readmission rates and issues with population health in the long run.
Successful utilization of technology and management of chronic disease patients often hinged on care coordinators. Accordingly, 77 percent of hospitals have employed care coordinators, and a smaller number of physician practices are using some type of coordinator.
Overall, effective care coordination is vital to improving performance in value-based chronic disease management. Moreover, successful care coordination can simplify processes like medication management or referrals for patients with chronic diseases and ensure that steps are taken to improve health outcomes.
Smaller practices responding to the survey often encountered problems when pursuing care coordination. One subspecialty physician highlighted the issue with hiring care coordinators for smaller practices.
“It would have been a tough sell for a practice of our size even though we have 30 providers,” they commented. “A patient coordinator wasn’t going to pay out—we couldn’t get the return on investment.”
The priority of a value-based care model for chronic disease management is to reduce uncertainty for chronic disease patients and improve their interactions with providers so that both patients and organizations can benefit medically and financially. Current models of care differ from practice to practice, and the end goals of organizations vary based on their participation in value-based models.
For now, providers are still working out the kinks to optimize their chronic disease management and value-based platforms. To learn more about how they are doing this, read Insight’s newest report HERE.
