Colorado Health Plans Collaborate to Create Data-sharing Solution for Care Providers
Seven health plans in Colorado are collaborating on a multi-payer data-sharing online tool that aims to enhance and improve the delivery of care for Colorado residents.
The idea emerged from the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative, a national collaboration among public and private health plans to strengthen primary care. Health plans participating in the Colorado CPC (CO CPC) are working together to make it easier for primary care practices to transition to a more integrated, family care centered approach to serving patients.
Care providers currently receive multiple reports from each health plan and have to log on to several different websites to access patient data, making it cumbersome and inefficient for care providers to coordinate a patient’s care.
However, CO CPC members are now developing a single source for patient-level information that will help care providers save time and resources, enabling them to spend more time with patients.
A majority of the payers participating in CO CPC agreed to finance an innovative tool that allows care providers to access their patients’ claims data from one website. Rise Health will partner with Colorado’s Center for Improving Value in Health Care and other state and local entities to build the tool and help ensure a comprehensive approach to data aggregation.
“This initiative represents a major step forward for both providers and payers in Colorado. For the first time, physicians will be able to access actionable, patient-specific data across multiple insurers and self-funding employers in a single analytic tool,” said Patrick Gordon, associate vice president at Rocky Mountain Health Plans.
A single reporting solution will provide more accurate patient-level reporting and information. For the first time, healthcare practices will be able to look at patient care across the entire spectrum of services. Ultimately, it will enable physicians and health plans to benchmark their practices in a more efficient manner. “We are moving into a new era of health care and it is exciting to be a part of providing this level of data to the providers of care, especially in rural areas,” said Cindy Palmer, CEO of Colorado Choice Health Plans.
“This represents an innovative solution to a longstanding problem. Too often, it’s either feast or famine; providers either lack sufficient information or they are bombarded with too much. Now, we can provide them the right amount of information at the right time,” said Kelly Henry, network director, payment innovation programs at Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield.
“Colorado continues to play a leading role in developing innovative solutions that build deeper relationships with care providers and help increase quality of care and reduce costs for patients,” said Beth Soberg, president and CEO of UnitedHealthcare of Colorado. “This new initiative will simplify care providers’ ability to access important patient information to help better manage population health.”
Over the past two years, the payers looked at the evidence, listened to physician leaders, agreed on common measures of success, and collaborated on a rigorous, competitive process that resulted in an aggregated-data solution that is both practice-focused and patient-centered, while meeting the unique needs of the Colorado market.
Colorado Medicaid is hopeful that the multi-payer agreement, and the selection of Rise Health as the vendor, marks the beginning of another, much longer, process. The payers are committed to sustainable practice transformation in Colorado, and data aggregation may be one piece of a longer-term strategy.
“We’re building on the CO CPC opportunity, but it’s just a launching pad. We believe we’ve created a program that is the beginning of a long collaboration to help improve Colorado’s health care system,” said Dr. Judy Zerzan, chief medical officer and deputy director, Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (Colorado Medicaid).
The following payers are participating in the data aggregation solution:
• Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield
• Cigna
• Colorado Access
• Colorado Choice Health Plans
• Colorado Medicaid/Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing
• Rocky Mountain Health Plans
• UnitedHealthcare
Practices can expect access to the data aggregation tool in the first quarter of 2015; details about implementation will be available soon.