Practice Management News

3M, Verily to Create Healthcare Revenue Cycle, Pop Health Tool

3M plans to collaborate with Verily to develop a population health measurement platform to help providers better manage their healthcare revenue cycle.

By Jacqueline LaPointe

- 3M Health Information Systems recently partnered with Verily Life Sciences to develop a technological platform that providers and payers can use to analyze population health measurements to better assess clinical and healthcare revenue cycle performance, according to a recent press release.

3M, Verily partnership to help providers evaluate healthcare revenue cycle through population health data

Through the collaboration, both companies aim to create a data analytics tool that can examine quality performance data across healthcare delivery systems and patient populations to provide insights on how to establish sustainable healthcare cost and quality improvements.

“We have the data analytics and software to understand trends and make predictions across large quantities of data, and we see a clear opportunity to apply this approach to health data for insights that can impact care,” stated Tom Stanis, Head of Software and Analytics at Verily.

“Together, with 3M's know-how and deep expertise in parsing and coding clinical data, we imagine a world where providers have precise information to guide focused improvement, and can consistently access objective, actionable feedback to make informed decisions,” Stanis added.

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  • The companies intend for the performance measurement platform to take population-level health datasets and transform them into meaningful and actionable insights that healthcare stakeholders can use to assess performance, decrease waste, and pinpoint improvement areas for efficiency, quality, and healthcare costs.

    The joint platform will be developed to include quality measures, such as rate of complications, hospital readmissions, and mortality, and healthcare cost measures, including length of stay and specific service line costs. Using the tool, providers and payers are expected to receive performance evaluations across departments, procedures, and practitioners, including downstream providers like specialists, home health providers, and transitional care facilities.

    Additionally, the companies intend to use each other’s healthcare experience to build the population health measures platform. The tool will use 3M’s experience with health data coding and classification as well as its risk stratification methods, which are currently used by federal agencies, hospital associations, and state Medicaid agencies for hospital quality reporting and alternative payment model development.

    Verily also plans to use its experience to develop robust data analytics capabilities, software tools, and algorithms to help transform the data into actionable information.

    “At 3M, we are constantly evaluating how health information technology can help improve the efficiency, quality and cost of delivering care,” stated JaeLynn Williams, 3M Health Information Systems Vice President and General Manager. “This collaboration reflects our commitment to continued innovation in health information systems that address real-world problems facing health care today, while protecting the privacy and security of health data.”

    More robust data analytics tools may also be the key to succeeding under new value-based reimbursement programs. Several alternative payment models, such as bundled payments and accountable care organizations, require providers to submit quality and cost performance data in order to receive payment. Claims reimbursement amounts also depend on provider performance.

    “What providers absolutely must have are really powerful analytics that are able to take clinical and outcomes data, a lot of which resides in clinical systems, and combine it with financial data to accurately measure where we improve quality based on outcomes results,” Deanna Kasim, Research Director of Payer Health IT at IDC Health Insights, told RevCycleIntelligence.com.

    “There is an absolute need that if this is going to be successful in terms of changing reimbursements and care delivery models, payers need to get providers and the consumers to the table and there has to be the next generation of analytics applications to support these efforts.”

    Dig Deeper:

    Preparing the Healthcare Revenue Cycle for Value-Based Care

    How to Choose the Right Healthcare Big Data Analytics Tools