For clinically integrated networks to succeed, what role does health IT play? A critical one.

While the development of clinically integrated networks (CINs) began as a means for collective bargaining between physician practices and health plans, the framework has become a way for healthcare providers to succeed as the industry continues to transition to value-based reimbursement payment models.

Because CINs are jointly governed groups of providers — including independent physicians, physician groups, and hospital- and health system-employed physicians — they can be instrumental in implementing important quality-of-care protocols and monitoring, achieving enterprise-wide operational efficiencies, pooling infrastructure and other resources, and jointly contracting with commercial and government payers on a shared savings or financial risk basis.

But to succeed in most of those areas, we believe a CIN must fully embrace and plan for a critical organizational component — advanced health IT.

An effective CIN in today’s healthcare environment must be able to combine and analyze disparate data from dissimilar organizational repositories. The network must be able to accurately measure and improve physician performance and patient engagement across organizational players, as well as provide insights for better and more cost-effective care management and contract negotiation. And to help unlock the ever-expanding potential of data and analytics, artificial intelligence analytics could be used to empower continuous learning systems to further enable CIN success.