The Premier healthcare alliance, which includes 2,800 hospitals and 93,000 other provider and payer organizations across the country, has partnered with Phytel to automate population health services in order to help its members scale their efforts to improve patient care and adapt to a rapidly changing healthcare system.

A comprehensive population health suite enables providers to manage patient care more efficiently, with a better understanding of outcomes and total cost, Premier officials say. It helps to focus on care delivered outside the hospital using predictive analytics to profile an entire population, not just those who have been treated. The intelligence garnered can more effectively support emerging care delivery and risk management models through health reform as providers participating in accountable care organizations are reimbursed based on quality and cost overall.

[See also: Premier makes big connect with big data.]

“One of the things we’re really excited about is the data integration opportunities that bringing Phytel to the community brings,” said Alejandro Reti, MD, senior director, population health, for the alliance. “The emphasis of the Premier platform is to make previously disparate data sets available for analytics that together drive more insights that were not possible before. I think understanding what works in terms of moving the dial on patient behavior – that’s one area where analytics will be able to shed new light by accomplishing some of that data integration.

“Phytel helps us to improve the quality of preventive and chronic care by identifying patients with gaps in treatment and re-engaging them with their providers,”said Thomas Auer, MD, CEO of Bon Secours Virginia Medical Group, a Premier member who already uses Phytel technology, As he sees it, Premier’s partnership with Phytel further provides alliance members the set of tools they need “to thrive through reform, and ultimately improve the long-term health outcomes of and engagement from the people we serve.”

Premier is working to encourage members to adopt solutions that will help its members succeed in a rapidly changing healthcare climate, said Jeff Petry, vice president of strategic initiatives, Premier healthcare alliance.

[See also: Premier's QUEST collaborative expands reach].

“Premier has a number of methods to help encourage that adoption," Petry said, “not just the purchase of the product, but actually the use and the value of the tool. We do that largely through these collaboratives . . . We’ve been doing a lot of work around the adoption and practices of value-based purchasing for acute care hospitals for decades."

Added Petry, “There’s a tremendous amount of interest in it – interest that’s been bubbling for some time. I think we’re at a point now, as ACOs have become more adopted at a federal level, as well as with commercial health plans, organizations are having to really put these capabilities in place. They can no longer just talk about it, they actually have to start doing it, if they’re managing risk and managing more value-based reimbursement models.” 

Keith J. Figlioli, Premier senior vice president of healthcare informatics, agrees. “The integration of technologies that deliver real-time, predictive decision support is integral for disease and care management, and system-wide quality improvement,” he said. “Combining Premier and Phytel information, providers will access a full suite of automated population health intelligence to eliminate variation, increase patient engagement, improve care coordination and keep people healthy across the inpatient and outpatient continuum.”

Phytel aggregates data from electronic health records, lab systems, and information exchanges across more than 30 million patients.

"By integrating the capabilities of Phytel and Premier, providers can go beyond analytics to scale patient care to the population level, bridging the gap between caring for individual patients and assuming responsibility for the health of an entire patient population," said Steve Schelhammer, CEO of Phytel. "Accomplishing that requires not only clinical data on care gaps, inefficiencies or at-risk patients, but also automated tools that can be deployed to assist care teams with engaging patients and driving improved outcomes.”

What’s happened in the last 12 months, Schelhammer said, is that there’s been “kind of a jarring change in the landscape where these organizations are rapidly and increasingly taking risk contracts, and they can’t stay in the pilot mode any longer. They have to scale.”

They have to manage perhaps 20 different conditions, 10 to 15 sub-initiatives in those conditions, he said.

“To scale that model, they have to leverage automation and the technologies we’re putting together with this offering. That’s really an important challenge they have to address, to actually scale into a full population management mode as opposed to a pilot mode."