Move to Value CHESS Health Solutions

It’s patient experience week here in the United States, and we have asked CHESS President Dr. Yates Lennon to share his story about how, as a practicing provider, he took the time to listen to feedback from his patients and implement changes which not only led to better patient experience scores but shed new light on the importance of value-based care.
Doctor Lennon, welcome to the Move to Value Podcast. Would you share your story about being a provider and how you came to realize the importance of the patient experience in health care?
So, my name is Yates Lennon and I am an ObGyn by training, practice, private practice, obstetrics and gynecology from 1993 to 1998 in Hot Springs, Arkansas and then in 1998 moved back to North Carolina, which was home, to practice in a small private practice in Asheboro, North Carolina. From 98 until 2008, we were a small independent group for physicians at at most. And in 2008, our group really saw the early, phases of value-based care coming. We saw, the landscape of regulatory requirements, changing quickly and, and understood that keeping up with that was going to be a significant challenge. We were one of the first ObGyn practices as a small group to go on to, electronic health records. So, we did that, and actually we did that in 2002, I believe. But then in 2008, as we really sort of started seeing the handwriting on the wall, we felt like we needed to join forces with a larger organization that could really help us keep up, stay abreast of what was happening while we continued to focus on delivering care to our patients.
So in 2008, we merged our practice into what was then Cornerstone Health Care, based in High Point, as we merged in and became a part of that organization around 2011, I had expressed an interest to the leadership at that time of becoming more involved in an administrative capacity of some sort, did not have a particular path in mind, but but knew that I had always enjoyed the administrative side of medicine and, and running a small practice. So, I was asked at that time if I would consider taking on an overhaul of the patient experience for the Cornerstone Group. So, we formed a multidisciplinary team, included, physicians, advanced practice providers, CMAs, nurse assistants, nurses, office managers, front desk staff. The throughout the whole organization, through all levels of the organization came together and formed a group, that later was named peak, patient expectations are key. And in the course of that, I really began to see, how important patient experience really was. And, and even though I had practiced for a long time, I never really thought that much about the patient experience of care. Fast forward another year or two. Cornerstone had begun the their first efforts at a patient experience survey, which was done online.
Prior to that, it was a paper survey, and it was handed out at the desk to patients. So not incredibly random. We employ a employed, a large provider that, did these online surveys. And I was actually very excited to see my first survey. I had a large patient panel, had a good reputation in the community, and was excited to see these first results. Unbeknownst to me, when they came in, our office manager took it upon herself to post them at the back door, and I came in and saw my scores and they were by far the worst of anyone in our practice, and I was devastated. I went through all of Kubler-Ross stages of grief in the span of about 15 minutes. But following that, I decided, you know what? There's a message here. So, what is that message? What What are my patients trying to tell me? are kind enough to fill out the surveys, tell me how I'm doing. I need to be wise enough to listen. So, I started assessing what a visit in my office actually looked like. I thought the the highest standard was efficiency, that if I was efficient and always on time, that that would be what made everyone happy....

Today we listen to a conversation that began at the North Carolina Hospital Association’s winter meeting between Bamboo Health Senior Director of Growth, Ellen Solomon, and CHESS Director of Value-based Operations, Rachel Holder. Ellen and Rachel get together for the podcast to continue the discussion on the topic of Navigating Value-based Care through Real Time Intelligence.
RH: Thanks so much, Ellen, for joining us today. So can you give us a really brief introduction about yourself, your role, and tell us a little bit about Bamboo Health?
ES: Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me, Rachel. It was great getting to chat with you at the North Carolina Healthcare Association winter meeting. But for folks that don't know me, my name is Ellen Solomon. I'm senior director of National Health System growth at Bamboo Health. I've been here for six years and I currently live in Charlotte, but I always love calling out to my North Carolina customers. I was born and raised in a small town of Reidsville, NC And so in terms of what we do, folks in North Carolina may remember us as patient ping or Appriss Health. We've since come together and rebranded as Bamboo Health back in 2021. And I'll first start again with sort of who we are at a very high level and then I'll go into North Carolina as well as obviously how we work with you guys, Rachel. But in one sentence, Bamboo Health is an intelligent care collaboration network across all 50 states. The problem we work to solve is that as you know better than me, healthcare was built on silos. Those silos could be the EMR that you use, your geographic location, state lines or the setting of care, whether that's acute post, acute, ambulatory. And those silos make engaging patients and coordinating care in real time very difficult. And even more difficult when you're actually trying to bend the cost curve and improve patient outcomes like readmissions, Ed utilization, post acute length of stay and many others. And so in short, I compare Bamboo Health to expedia.com. You have all these hotel chains, you have all these airline companies that are competing for your business. They operate their own platforms, their own tools and they don't really want to share with each other. But Expedia brings them together in a really simple way and that's where Bamboo Health sits. And so today in North Carolina, we support our customers really in three use cases. The first one which we'll drill into more I believe in, in this discussion and how chess uses Bamboo is we enable value based care use cases through our engaged admission discharge and transfer or ADT network. And in North Carolina specifically over 80% of the hospitals in the state participate. We have over 800 post acutes, over 50 provider organizations. And this actually started back in 2017 when we partnered with NCHA who's really been instrumental in helping us build out this ENGAGE network. That network does extend to all 50 states. Secondly, we partner with the state of North Carolina as well as 45 other states to support prescription drug monitoring or PDMP program to help continue to curb the opioid epidemic. And then lastly, we're rolling out a behavioral health referral network also known as BH scan in the state. So I think the, So what their common thread between all those use cases is it's real time actionable and through an engaged network. And so Rachel, I know when we spoke at NCHA, Chess has been such a long standing bamboo partner. You all have really been with us from the beginning. I'd love if you could share more about some of the challenges you're hearing from your value partners as they're transitioning into more risk and value based care.

RH: Yeah. Thanks so much Ellen. So I think gone are the days that just a high AWV rate and some...

In this episode, we listen in on a conversation between Mountain Valley Hospice Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation, Maria Hayes, and CHESS Health Solutions Senior Director of Clinical Operations, Dr. Kim Vass Eudy, about End of Life Care, the difference between palliative care and hospice care, and how Providers can utilize these services.
KVE: Well, thank you and welcome to the Move to Value podcast. I am really excited to bring a guest with me today. Her name is Maria Hayes. She is the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Mountain Valley. I am excited to speak with her because in my clinical team, we are working towards bringing advanced care planning to our value partners and their patients. And Maria and I have been working kind of behind the scenes talking about this. So I really want to bring that conversation out forward Maria and I'm really glad to have you here today.
MH: Thank you. I'm super excited to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

KVE: I was hoping you could kind of kick this off by telling us a little bit about palliative care and Hospice care. I know as a clinician, when I make a referral, sometimes I just do a bucket referral, I say just give them palliative or give them Hospice, whichever one this patient qualifies for. So maybe you could help me understand and our listeners understand the difference between the two.

MH: Absolutely. And I can actually start off by kind of giving you a little bit of an overview about Mountain Valley, if that will be helpful. And then I'll kind of go into Hospice versus palliative care. So, Mountain Valley is a Hospice and palliative care organization serving 18 counties across North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. We were established in 1983, so we just celebrated our 40th anniversary. Headquartered in Dobson, NC, we provide care in a large service area with six Hospice offices, 4 serious illness specialist locations and two inpatient Hospice care centers. We also have two Hospice thrift stores. We call them the Humble Hare and those stores actually benefit our charity care programs.
Palliative care is a little bit different than Hospice care. So palliative care is a specialized medical care for people living with a serious illness. This can be cancer, heart failure, lung disease, dementia, Parkinson's disease or ALS. Patients in palliative care may receive medical care aimed at easing their symptoms along with treatment intended to be aggressive or curative. Palliative care is meant to enhance a person's current care by focusing on quality of life for them and their family. In addition to offering support to ease symptoms, the palliative care provider also specializes in leading and navigating the goals of care discussion, which we kind of referenced earlier. We help patients consider or even complete their advanced directives as well. Our palliative care providers are serious illness specialists who add another layer of support and work as a part of the patient's medical team. So that's kind of how palliative operates in, in that form or fashion.

KVE: I was going to ask you a lot of times, I know that a patient may start in palliative care and then transition to Hospice is and I know you're going to explain a little bit more about Hospice. Is that a pretty natural transition for a lot of patients?

MH: It is sometimes for patients. We see a lot of patients that truly can be Hospice, but they actually choose palliative because they feel more comfortable still kind of seeking their curative approaches, still seeing their medical doctors still treating their heart failure with the heart failure medications and they really kind of they're just not ready for that Hospice conversation. And but typically I would say palliative and Hospice, we really like to focus on the six months or less for their life span kind of looking at all those factors and then...

In today’s episode, we visit with Josh Vire, Vice President of Value-based Operations at CHESS Health Solutions, who shares his insights on managed Medicaid and how CHESS leveraged years of experience to enter into Medicaid to create an all patient solution.
Josh Vire, welcome to the Move to Value podcast.
Thank you, Thomas. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

So, Josh, let's talk about managed Medicaid. First, can you tell me what is managed Medicaid?
Sure. It may be easiest to start by sort of describing how traditional Medicaid works. In traditional Medicaid, typically this operates under what's called a fee for service payment model. This model is going to reimburse providers directly for every service that they provide to Medicaid beneficiaries. And generally the upside to this model is that it's going to allow for the flexibility and provider choice for the beneficiaries. But what we often see is that this leads to fragmented care and ultimately the incentives in this fee for service type model really incentivizes the volume of services over outcomes. So, in contrast to that, Managed Medicaid utilizes alternative payment models including capitation and what are called value-based payments. And the way that the capitation works is that a managed care organization or a MCO as they're referred to will receive a fixed monthly payment per Medicare beneficiary that's going to cover all their health care needs. And then that fixed payments are paid regardless the amount of services that are provided. And then those MCOs are going to use those funds to incentivize providers to be more cost effective in their care as well as incentivize sort of tighter coordination of the care. And then what they can layer on to those, as I mentioned, is the value-based care payments which are intended to reward providers based on the quality and outcomes of care rather than just the quantity of services provided. And so in theory, right, this would encourage more efficient, high-quality delivery of care. In addition, managed Medicaid may employ other payment models that are along that continuum of value based care payments, which could be like pay for performance or bundle payments. But really the goal there is to align the incentives to focus on driving down total cost of care as well as improving health outcomes for beneficiaries.

Well last December North Carolina made the transition to managed Medicaid and Chess spent the year prior to that establish establishing the infrastructure and beginning to make preparations to offer this service. Can you tell me why this decision was made and a little bit of the story about how Chess built this service line.
Absolutely. CHESS has a decades plus long history of working with providers to transform care delivery to value based care. And historically our focus has been on traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage and commercial contracts. But as we went through our engagements with our value partners and then as we began to have discussions with providers across the state, we heard consistently that one of their pain points was the need to work with of having to work with multiple enablement companies to serve all their patients. So some enablement companies only work with MA or maybe the traditional Medicare options or commercial. But no one was really acting as sort of a one stop shop in in serving the entire patient population for these providers. So our decision to expand our services to include Medicaid was really driven by our desire to be what we call an all-patient solution, which essentially just means we want to be able to align incentives across the provider's entire patient population. And really that's because we believe this is how true transformation can and will occur, not in certain segments, but by treating all patients with an eye towards that cost containment and...

In this episode we continue our interoperability conversation with CHESS Vice President of Health Informatics, Mark Dunnagan. Last time, we focused on the importance of shared data in value based care and the need to overcome any barriers. Today we talk about the logistics of interoperability and the modernization of data exchange.
Mark, last time we left off talking about data exchange There always seems to be ongoing conversations in this topic about APIs. Do you feel like more improvement in APIs could be a potential solution?
I do I use the metaphor of a quiver of arrows quite often when describing you know interoperability. I think you know it's my job as you know the head of a team that that must figure out how to get data and get it in a timely fashion and in a way that fulfills our contractual obligations and our obligations to the patient. I think APIs is one more arrow in the quiver. You know it gives us a programmatic way to access you know large volumes of complex data, but it's not necessarily the only way. You know when we sign on a health system let's say to one of our ACOs, you know I can pretty much rest assured that they're using one of a small number of vendors and you know those vendors are fully capable of producing certain constructs that that my team can consume. Same with most payers. Although you know, the outputs may differ certainly. But as I work my way down the chain, particularly in working with ambulatory clinics and what not, you know, I gosh last time I checked there are over 200 EMRs here in my home state of North Carolina. Each one of those with a slightly different interpretation of certain standards. Not all of them have viable API interfaces, you know, not all of them have the same way of communicating with them. So, I have to be open to old school HL 7, which is kind of the equivalent of opening up a channel and typing over it. I have to be open to flat file exchange. I have to be open to various forms of XML, JSON, and it truly depends on what that endpoint can offer. So again, APIs are extremely valuable but they're not the only tool that a team like mine has to has to be able to wield to be interoperable to be successful in the exchange of healthcare data.
Interesting. So as someone who's spent a career in the data and informatics space, can you share how these analytical tools help control the cost of healthcare?
There's many answers to this. I would say again I'll draw back to what we do which is value based services. You know I need to know when something happens and I need to be able to inform our performance improvement teams and so that they can communicate with the providers. I need to inform the care managers when something of interest when someone is checked into a hospital, someone has sought, you know, specialty care outside of network, when someone has been discharged, they need to know that and I need to inform them, you know, not only that it's happened, but give them enough descriptive information that they can intervene appropriately. I would go further to say that I need to glean enough good information, rather my team has to be able to accumulate and collate enough information to get ahead of what might be coming. You know, we're making some very powerful strides, you know, not only in, you know, intelligently stratifying our population to kind of know who to intervene with first, but also in quantifying rising risk and rising cost. Who do we think based on what we're seeing happen now? What do we think's going to happen to them tomorrow? And can we get ahead of that in time to affect that? Can we keep them out of the hospital? Do we know there's a costly intervention or fall coming, and can we intervene or get them some community based services in time? So, you know it's a large part of what we do and and again something that at least on the value side we have to contemplate every day.
Do...

Today we are here with Mark Dunnagan, CHESS Vice President of Health Informatics to talk about Interoperability, what it means, why it matters in health care, and how better access to patient data for the entire care team will lead to improved outcomes for patients at a lower cost.
Mark Dunnagan, welcome to the Move to Value podcast.
Thanks, Thomas. Glad to be here.
So, Mark, today I want to talk a little bit about interoperability with you. So, can you first off explain what interoperability is?
Well, in the in the simplest terms, interoperability at least in in my travels is a is a metaphor for a conversation. Think of it like provider A wants to talk to provider B about patient Mark and it's a means of making that happen.
And why is interoperability important for healthcare?
Well, I think in line with the metaphor of the conversation, you know, I think fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years ago when you only had one physician and they knew everything about you. You know, maybe it made sense, but in modern times with you know the various ways of receiving care, you know it, physicians don't know everything about you and there's no way for those forms that you fill out, you know, annoyingly so, when you go to the physician's office can express everything that has happened to you. Interoperability is, is the key to that. Again, to know where Mark's been and what happened to Mark and why it may have happened.
Well Mark, can you share a real world example of how interoperability provides value to healthcare?
So, I can and it's part and parcel of that what we do on the value side literally every day. We receive what we call ADT feeds. It's basically a notification that you know one of the patients under our care has recently checked into a hospital or has recently depending on the depth of the ADT Feed perhaps been seen out of network or gone to specialty services or whatnot. But that ADT Feed that notification that that one of the lives that we care about has been touched in some way by healthcare entities around us gives us information that we need to know to intervene appropriately. That if someone has been discharged home that we can you know abide by our contractual obligations to check in on them. That if someone has been seen out of network perhaps you know seeking high cost, high value services that we can make sure we understand what and why. And again provided you know the appropriate care management or interventions to help them with that. So again you know that is part and parcel what my teams deal with every day in a in a huge part of of the services that we provide. Without that form of interoperability we would struggle to provide the value that we do.
That’s fascinating. So, so we've established that the need for patient data exchange between providers is very important. How can we, how can we continue to close this information gap, how can we make this a better exchange?
There's a million answers to this. I think I think that the foundational elements to make interoperability real or are there and to be honest with you have been there for some time Now, granted, what becomes interoperable meaning the data that we need to share continues to expand. You know of late; you know care plans and then the ingestion or the sharing of perhaps behavioral health information, you know the breadth of the data continues to expand. But the notions of interoperability have always been there as far as the structure, you know, the, the shape if you will, of the data and how it's exchanged and then kind of the language, the nomenclature, the codified values there, there are at least examples and standard terminologies that can be used for most everything. I think you know, for me the struggles, if you will, continue to be around, you know, adoption and certainly EMR technologies take...