Performance management insights may help encourage physician support of value-based care models

As the healthcare industry continues to transition to value-based reimbursement models, clinically integrated networks (CINs) can be leveraged to enable members — including hospital-employed physicians and physician groups — to work together to improve quality and reduce costs.

Many experts agree that one of the keys to a successful CIN is physician engagement. Yet 73 percent of physicians surveyed in a recent study said they prefer fee-for-service payment contracts. And many said they’re not convinced value-based models improve clinical outcomes¹.

It’s not unusual for physicians to need a clinical rationale for changing the way they deliver care; their first concerns are for their patients, not the bottom line. That’s why financial logic alone may not change long-established norms. Fortunately, CINs that incorporate advanced health IT may help allay providers’ concerns.

Sophisticated CINs can use technology to collect, link and combine data from hundreds of disparate sources, including clinical, claims, billing, accounting, device, community and patient-derived data. That technology can then aggregate, normalize and curate data in near-real time, so that reliable, actionable information can be delivered to physicians for timelier feedback — when they can still impact care.

Additionally, with the right IT systems in place, providers can:

• See how well they’re doing in relation to past performance, the median scores of colleagues and external benchmarks
• Drill down into the data to view summaries of patients’ care and see how it differs from the practice guidelines that the CIN members have agreed to follow
• Visualize the preventive and chronic care gaps as part of a point-of-care or single-sign-on solution within the electronic health record workflow

1. Van Biesen T, Weisbrod J, Brookshire M, Coffman J, Pasternak A. “Front Line of Healthcare Report 2017: Why involving doctors can help improve US healthcare,” May 11, 2017, Bain & Company, accessed at http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_REPORT_Front_Line_of_Healthcare_2017.pdf.