As executive director of the Staten Island Performing Provider System, Joseph Conte is overseeing part of one of the more ambitious and creative healthcare initiatives in New York: the new Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program.

The DSRIP program, begun in April 2014, promotes community-level collaborations and focuses on system reform, specifically a goal to achieve a 25 percent reduction in avoidable hospital use over five years.

“Our organization works with hospitals and community-based providers to develop quality programs. We focus on how we work for our partners in the community and focus on value-based outcomes and away from fee for service," Conte said.

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"For example, are you keeping these patients out of the ER and giving them appropriate care in the right setting and keeping down costs and keeping patients satisfied and healthy?” he added.

A significant component of the program is the development of a technology platform to enable healthcare data sharing and analytics.

“We’re interested in the sharing of health information across continuum of care,” Conte said. “From primary care hospitals to doctors to outpatients to short term rehabilitation facilities, how can all information flow without interruption?”

Conte will outline DRISP’s experience at HIMSS16 in a session titled “Addressing the IT Challenges for a Startup DSRIP Program.”

Conte will be joined by Raj Lakhanpal, CEO of SpectraMedix, a provider of a DSRIP-focused solution for clinical data collection and aggregation, quality measure compliance, predictive modeling and workflow integration.

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Conte and Lakhanpal will show how SI PPS addresses the challenges of consolidating and analyzing data to support its DSRIP projects by implementing a next generation information technology platform.

The program represents a change in thinking about how best to serve communities, Conte said. “How is the health of the community, as opposed to how many colostomies or pediatric surgeries have you performed? Now, the government wants to pay for value not for episodic care. The program may look at an entire community to look at its overall health and figure ways to serve it.”

Conte and Lakhanpal's session will take place on March 2 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Sans Expo Convention Center, Delfino 4004. HIMSS runs from February 29 – March 4, 2016.

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