Claudia Williams at MedCityNews: “The path to value-based care is arduous. For health plans, their ability to manage care, assess quality, lower costs, and streamline reporting is directly impacted by access to clinical data. For providers, the same can be said due to their lack of access to claims data.
Providers and health plans are increasingly demanding integrated claims and clinical data to drive and support value-based care programs. These organizations know that clinical and claims information from more than a single organization is the only way to get a true picture of patient care. From avoiding medication errors to enabling an evidence-based approach to treatment or identifying at-risk patients, the value of integrated claims and clinical data is immense — and will have far-reaching influence on both health outcomes and costs of care over time.
On July 30, Medicare announced the Data at the Point of Care pilot to share valuable claims data with Medicare providers in order to “fill in information gaps for clinicians, giving them a more structured and complete patient history with information like previous diagnoses, past procedures, and medication lists.” But that’s not the only example. To transition from fee-for-service to value-based care, providers and health plans have begun to partner with health data networks to access integrated clinical and claims data:
Health plan adoption of integrated data strategy
A California health plan is partnering with one of the largest nonprofit health data networks in California, to better integrate clinical and claims data. …
Providers leveraging claims data to understand patient medication patterns
Doctors using advanced health data networks typically see a full list of patients’ medications, derived from claims, when they treat them. With this information available, doctors can avoid dangerous drug to-drug interactions when they prescribe new medications. After a visit, they can also follow up and see if a patient actually filled a prescription and is still taking it….(More)”.