Aggregation Tool To Help Care Providers Created
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative-driven effort brings aggregated actionable data to clinicians’ fingertips.
A group of seven health plans in Colorado have joined together to create a multi-payer aggregated data-sharing online tool that will enhance and improve the delivery of care for the state's residents, according to a press release.
Driven by the national Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative, health plans participating in the Colorado CPC (CO CPC) are working together on the state level to find ways to facilitate the transition of primary care practices to more integrated, family-care centered approaches to serving patients.
Currently, care providers receive multiple reports from each health plan and have to access patient information across multiple websites, a time-consuming and complicated for care providers to coordinate a patient’s care. The CO CPC members are developing a single source for patient-level information to save time and resources, enabling care providers to spend more time with patients.
Rise Health and Colorado’s Center for Improving Value in Health Care will partner with other state and local entities in order to create the tool and implement a comprehensive approach to data aggregation.
The following payers are participating in the data aggregation solution, which is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2015: Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Cigna, Colorado Access, Colorado Choice Health Plans, Colorado Medicaid/Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, Rocky Mountain Health Plans, and UnitedHealthcare, marking more than half of the major market issuers. However, according to Healthcare Payer News, Kaiser Permanente’s Foundation Health Plan, one of the state’s five largest insurers, is not participating.
“This initiative represents a major step forward for both providers and payers in Colorado. For the first time, physicians will be able to access actionable, patient-specific data across multiple insurers and self-funding employers in a single analytic tool," Patrick Gordon, associate vice president at Rocky Mountain Health Plans in the release.
“Colorado continues to play a leading role in developing innovative solutions that build deeper relationships with care providers and help increase quality of care and reduce costs for patients,” Beth Soberg, president and CEO of UnitedHealthcare of Colorado, stated in the release. “This new initiative will simplify care providers’ ability to access important patient information to help better manage population health.”
Colorado Medicaid is optimistic that Rise Health’s selection as vendor, and the multi-payer agreement, portends the beginning of another, much longer, process. The payers are committed to sustainable practice transformation in Colorado; and data aggregation may be one piece of a longer-term strategy.
“We’re building on the CO CPC opportunity, but it’s just a launching pad. We believe we’ve created a program that is the beginning of a long collaboration to help improve Colorado’s health care system,” Dr. Judy Zerzan, Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director, Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (Colorado Medicaid), said in the release.
Practices can expect access to the data aggregation tool in the first quarter of 2015; details about implementation will be available soon.