ChenMed has developed a delivery model focused on care for seniors in communities that have complicated healthcare issues, including heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and cancer. More than 70 percent of their patients have five or more chronic conditions, according to Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of the Health and Human Services Department.
Sivak visited ChenMed, based in southern Florida and now expanding in the Southeast, because it is an example of an innovative care model that improves patient care and makes its delivery more efficient.
Christopher Chen, MD, CEO, demonstrated how their uses of data are guiding clinical staff on decision making from the moment the patient walks through the door, Sivak wrote in a Jan. 28 blog.
Dashboards, clinical decision support tools, automated reminders, in-house pharmacy and drug utilization tracking systems are part of every care encounter. “Overseeing the operations is an ‘air-traffic control’ center that monitors the flow of patient services, measures patient experiences, and guides management decision making in real-time through each office visit,” he said.
ChenMed’s performance is tracked at multiple levels, including patient satisfaction and disease quality measure performance, such as hospitalization rates and hemoglobin A1C levels at a practice level for diabetes care effectiveness.
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Chen explained that his performance-based care model required them to build their own IT system to accommodate the types of practice they use to engage their patients in a non-fee-for-service based model.
Data-driven health care is changing outcomes, and innovation is occurring on the front lines in America’s primary health care. “We need to advocate for policies and innovators that test new approaches and gain insights in quantitative ways to improve the outcomes of all patients,” Sivak noted.
HHS agencies provide data sets, which are machine-readable and downloadable, from its vaults at Healthdata.gov for researchers and developers to use to create applications, products and services to improve healthcare, and also examples of how innovators are using data, like ChenMed. The Health Data Initiative is part of the Obama administration’s Open Data Initiative.
To further open up its data, the administration has created an online showcase, a first-draft release, which highlights selected Open Data resources and how they are already being used by private sector entrepreneurs to benefit people. Over time, it will grow and evolve to help catalyze future improvements to the design, content, and infrastructure of Data.gov, according to Danny Chapman, Ryan Panchadsaram, and John Paul Farmer, Presidential Innovation Fellows who developed the experimental site.
