Seven Advantages Payers Can Expect When Using Population Health Solutions

In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, payers face a multitude of challenges. From rising healthcare costs to the increasing complexity of managing diverse member populations, the need for effective solutions to optimize healthcare delivery and control costs has never been greater. Combine that with the growing demand for a more individualized, patient-centric approach and payers actively seek ways to find the right balance.

That’s where population health software solutions come in – powerful tools that help payers address these challenges head-on. When leveraging modern population health solutions, payers can expect the following seven business advantages:

1. Improved Data Management and Analysis:

One of the key advantages of population health software is its ability to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of healthcare data. Payers can harness this capability to gain deeper insights into their member populations, identifying trends, patterns, and risk factors. This comprehensive view of data allows payers to make informed decisions, such as developing targeted interventions, forecasting healthcare utilization, and allocating resources effectively. It also gives care managers the ability to deliver more personalized care plans that address the specific needs of members, especially those at risk for costly complications from chronic diseases.

2. Enhanced Care Coordination:

Effective care coordination is essential for improving patient outcomes and reducing costs. Population health solutions facilitate better communication and collaboration among healthcare providers, enabling seamless coordination of care plans. Payers can leverage this advantage to ensure their members receive the proper care at the right time, reducing unnecessary hospital admissions and readmissions. For example, the GuidingCare® Population Health Management module incorporates gaps-in-care analytics that enable clinical staff to identify high-risk patients and potential health improvement opportunities.

3. Risk Stratification and Predictive Analytics:

Population health solutions employ advanced algorithms to stratify members based on their health risks and needs. By categorizing members into risk tiers, payers can prioritize interventions for high-risk individuals, ultimately reducing costs associated with chronic conditions and preventable hospitalizations. Predictive analytics can help payers anticipate future healthcare trends and allocate resources accordingly.

4. Enhanced Member Engagement:

Engaging members in their healthcare is critical to improving health outcomes. Population health software provides payers the tools to create personalized health plans, offer wellness programs, and send targeted health information to members. Modern population health solutions can easily exchange information with member engagement solutions. For example, the GuidingCare care management platform is enhanced with the capabilities of Wellframe, a digital member engagement platform also from HealthEdge. Payers earn members’ trust by delivering a more personalized and compelling member experience. They can amplify and scale member support, access real-time member insights, unify the member experience, and consolidate staff workflows.

5. Efficient Claims Processing:

Streamlining claims processing is essential for reducing administrative costs and improving overall efficiency. Population health solutions, like GuidingCare’s Population Health Management module, often integrate with existing claims management systems, enabling payers to identify potential billing errors, fraud, and waste more effectively. For example, Care-Payer, the productized data exchange between HealthEdge’s core administrative processing system, HealthRules® Payer, and its care management platform, GuidingCare, enables the continuous management of member care and core administrative processes between the platforms. Care-Payer gives staff, care managers, and providers unparalleled access to near-real-time benefits information. Upon submission of the authorization in GuidingCare, users are assured that the authorization will flow through HealthRules Payer without error.

6. Compliance and Reporting:

The healthcare industry is heavily regulated, with numerous reporting requirements and quality measures to meet. Business intelligence capabilities within modern population health solutions can automate tracking and reporting these measures, ensuring that payers remain in compliance with government and industry standards. This reduces the risk of penalties and demonstrates a commitment to quality care.

7. Cost Savings and Revenue Generation:

Ultimately, the goal of any payer is to control costs while maintaining or improving the quality of care and member experiences. Population health software solutions enable payers to identify cost-saving opportunities, such as reducing hospital readmissions, preventing unnecessary tests and procedures, and negotiating favorable contracts with healthcare providers. Additionally, by improving member satisfaction and engagement, payers can potentially attract new members and generate additional revenue.

Population health software solutions have become critical tools for payers seeking to navigate the complex healthcare landscape effectively. Payers can control costs and improve the health and well-being of their members by harnessing the power of data analytics, care coordination, risk stratification, and member engagement. As healthcare continues to evolve, population health software will remain a critical component of payer strategies for delivering high-quality care while maintaining financial sustainability.

To learn more about GuidingCare population health management solutions, visit www.healthedge.com.

 

Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Top 3 Optimization Best Practices

Optimization: Go-Live is just the Beginning

It can be easy to implement a new platform and think, ‘Phew! Glad that’s over’. But in the world of digital transformation, it’s a journey, and Go-Live  is not the destination.

Build continuous optimization into your plan. We always recommend an annual optimization assessment where we have a team of SMEs sit with you and evaluate how you use the product. From that evaluation, we identify recommendations to improve workflows, take advantage of new features, and add integrations or automation to remove manual or time-consuming activities. In addition, planning for upgrades enables you to stay current on the platform, giving you more features to drive your business to continuous improvement.

Follow these optimization best practices and avoid these common pitfalls:

Optimization Top 3 Best Practices

1. Adopt a Strategic Operating Model

Plan to move from Project Governance to a Strategic Operating Model with your ecosystem partners. Share your roadmap with HealthEdge so that we can consider the best ways to support your success and ongoing growth plans.

2. Annual Optimization Assessment

Plan for an annual optimization assessment. Evaluate how you are using the solution and develop a set of recommendations designed to drive optimization. Software improves, business evolves, and your needs may change. Adopt a continuous improvement approach to the operation.

3. Quarterly Business Reviews

Conduct quarterly business reviews (cross functional with CSE, Services and Product leadership). Maintain tight alignment of business and product roadmaps, upgrades, enhancements, and support needs. Consider any blockers to your success and how we can help remove them in the upcoming quarter. Set partnership goals to ensure the best path to success.

3 Common Optimization Pitfalls

1. Disbanding the “Project”

The project completion is just the beginning. Don’t stop fostering partnerships and influencing roadmaps. Don’t adopt an implemented and “done” mentality. Continue to use our partnership to meet your goals through consulting or customization.

2. Diminishing Return on Investment

Don’t allow your investment value to decrease, your software to get outdated, or your teams to struggle. Be proactive rather than reactive.

3. Lagging Behind

Waiting too long to upgrade results in additional cost and effort. Don’t miss out on improvements requested by the customer base. Take advantage of our technical-only upgrades that can be completed in 4-5 months. Actively review release notes for features that may enhance your business and ask for help in identifying and implementing new features that fit your needs.

HealthEdge & Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation

By implementing the HealthEdge solutions you will transform your business and operations. Our solutions will automate your business workflows and seamlessly exchange  data in real-time across the ecosystem, allowing you to experience the business benefits of: 

  • Improved End-User & Consumer Centricity
  • Ever Reducing Transaction Costs
  • Ever Increasing Quality
  • Ever increasing service levels
  • Business transparency

HealthEdge Professional Services

HealthEdge’s Professional services provides expertise and support to accelerate your digital transformation. To become a next-generation health plan, you need a digital foundation that enables you to provide a transparent and person-centric experience at lower cost, higher quality, and higher service levels. HealthEdge® solutions provide that foundation – and HealthEdge Professional Services deliver the expertise and support to make the process swift, sure, and effective.

Learn more about HealthEdge Professional Services.

Join us for the rest of the Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation series

 

Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: 3 Critical Key Performance Indicators

Measuring your Success

Undertaking a healthcare payer digital transformation, such as migrating to a new CAPs or Care Management System is one of the biggest business transformations you might ever be involved in. With change and impact of this magnitude, it’s critical to constantly monitor the success of these changes.

This kind of change is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires ongoing measurement and optimization. Be prepared to measure your progress so you can quantify success and know when to pivot. To do this, organizations must identify what is important to them and set target goals.

Top 3 Measurement Metrics:

1. Legacy Benchmarks

Know your legacy KPIs. Consider initial KPIs to legacy such as transaction turnaround time, auto adjudication rates, authorization turnaround time, claims backlog, etc. Good questions to ask include:

  • Are your auto adjudication rates better than your legacy rates?
  • Are you getting better than average auto adjudication rates?
  • Are you able to measure customer satisfaction and tie it back to specific improvements you’ve made? Such as faster access to information for your customer service teams or a better member portal.
  • Have your authorization turnaround times improved?

2. Project Metrics During Implementation

Monitor project metrics weekly so that you can adjust proactively based on what your project is trying to achieve. Include KPIs to benchmark project metrics such as on time, on budget, in scope and employee satisfaction. If a project metric is go-live by end of year, that will affect project decisions such as adding additional scope or functionality that is not needed day 1.

3. Ongoing Quarterly Operational Metrics

Keep your metrics front and center. Use them to motivate the teams, adjust, and improve.

Top 3 Measurement Mistakes:

Don’t make these common mistakes:

1. Unable to prove it

Take the emotion out of evaluating success. Stick to the facts. Don’t rely on ‘trusting your gut’. Determine how the metric will be calculated, how often and by whom.

2. Perception over Reality

Let the data tell the story, measure the project health and guide changes. If you miss the target, determine the reasons why and create an action plan to get you back on track.

3. Getting Complacent

Stay vigilant and adjust as needed. Your business will evolve – keep pace.

Sample Measurement Dashboard

Showcasing your KPIs on a dashboard is a quick and easy way to showcase your progress on your digital transformation journey and rally your team. Share it with the project team and wider organization to bring everyone along on the transformation journey.

HealthEdge: Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation and Professional Services

HealthEdge’s Professional Services provides expertise and support to accelerate your digital transformation. To become a next-generation health plan, you need a digital foundation that enables you to provide a transparent and person-centric experience at lower cost, higher quality, and higher service levels. HealthEdge® solutions provide that foundation – and HealthEdge Professional Services deliver the expertise and support to make the process swift, sure, and effective.

Learn more about HealthEdge Professional Services.

Join us for the rest of the Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation series

Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Top 3 Strategic Plan Execution Tips

Strategic Plan Execution: Govern, Educate, and Enable

Once you have your digital transformation plan, the next step is to execute against that plan. It’s critical to follow it, document changes, assess impacts, and communicate. Governance, clear communication, and effective decision-making infrastructure are critically important. Do not underestimate the need for an Enterprise Program Management or Strategic Operating Model.

Top 3 Execution Best Practices

 

1. Project and Business Artifacts

Align on a standard set of projects and/or operational artifacts that you will use to track progress. Leverage schedules, reports and RAID logs to ensure that everyone involved and interested is following the same plan.

2. Change Management

Change is inevitable. Establish your internal change management processes to reach the grassroots. Change managements starts from the top and cannot be one & done. Plan on having a series of touch points (townhalls, weekly newsletters providing progress etc.) to continue to generate excitement about the new software at all levels.

3. Metrics

Keep your metrics front and center. Use them to motivate the teams, adjust and improve. Metrics need to drive your decisions. Test and stick to your benchmarks for an acceptable pass rate. Metrics also ensure accountability.

Top 3 Execution Mistakes

 

1. Limited Visibility

Limited visibility into progress, issues, and decisions that need to be made can multiply disruption in schedules and resolution. It can also build distrust amongst the teams involved. Always overcommunicate and ensure everyone is following the same plan. Sharing key artifacts across teams helps mitigate risk and disruption.

2. Confusion and Bad Decisions

Understand any impacts of the change to the overall project or business operations, reporting, timing, staffing, and support. The fastest way to sink a good plan is by not managing change effectively. Without a change management process, you will likely miss details around the impacts of the change.

3. Gut Decisions

Rely on metrics and data to inform decisions throughout the execution. Cutting corners on the time you dedicate to testing to hit a date means you will have to cut scope. Cutting scope means you are introducing unnecessary risk to your business. If you have a plan to test 100 E2E test scenarios that cover your critical business operations, and you reduce that to 50 E2E test cases you can expect at least half of your critical operations will likely have an issue that you discover in Production.

HealthEdge: Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation and Professional Services

HealthEdge’s Professional Services provides expertise and support to accelerate your digital transformation. To become a next-generation health plan, you need a digital foundation that enables you to provide a transparent and person-centric experience at lower cost, higher quality, and higher service levels. HealthEdge® solutions provide that foundation – and HealthEdge Professional Services deliver the expertise and support to make the process swift, sure, and effective.

Learn more about HealthEdge Professional Services.

Join us for the rest of the Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation series

 

 

 

Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: 3 Keys to Design your Future

When we think about your digital transformation a key part of it is designing for the future. This is where we examine: what do you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve it? What will achieving it mean to your members, your staff, and your organization?  

You are not investing in this transformation to rebuild your legacy system on a new technology. You are modernizing and improving your business operations, driving increased quality, better service and driving cost out of the transactions. Design based on best practices to meet your goals and objectives. Don’t be handcuffed by lack of feature/functionality of your existing solution – encourage curiosity and question why.

Design for your future: Top 3 Best Practices

 

1. Organizational Change Management (OCM)

Organizational change management plans are a critical success factor. Invest in this area and focus on communication plans, processes, staffing, and desk level procedures. Ensure the people, process, and technology components are identified and accounted for in the design plan.

Define and deploy strategies for successful user adoption. If the end users are not on board, health plans are unable to realize the full ROI of their investment.

2. Ecosystem Design

Finalize and design your ecosystem in its entirety. Design for goals and objectives and identify workstream leaders that are excited about the future changes. Embrace best practice designs. Remember – the “Just because we’ve always done it this way” mentality won’t deliver a transformation. Instead, ask yourself, “why did we do it this way?” Give yourself the time and space to reflect on why things were done in a certain way and how they can be enhanced.

3. Centered on Goals and Objectives

Design decisions in support of desired outcomes. Reinforce the goals and objectives frequently. Address the fears that people will be replaced with technology. They are being freed from manual processes so that they can use their expertise to focus on things that have a bigger impact.

Design for your digital transformation future: Top 3 Mistakes

Be sure to avoid the following missteps:

1. The “Surprise” Factor

The list of people, processes, and technology changes is extensive. Develop an OCM plan to mitigate risk. Don’t underestimate the data clean up that will be required.

2. Disruption

Changing ecosystem partners will impact data, integrations, timelines, and budgets. Avoid changing key vendors while the project is in flight. This can cause disruption and rework to data requirements.

3. Rebuilding Legacy Workflows

Legacy workflows are not delivering on your future state goal and objectives. Don’t let the notion of ‘perfect’ get in the way of ‘good enough/better’ than today.

HealthEdge: Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation and Professional Services

HealthEdge’s Professional Services provides expertise and support to accelerate your digital transformation. To become a next-generation health plan, you need a digital foundation that enables you to provide a transparent and person-centric experience at lower cost, higher quality, and higher service levels. HealthEdge® solutions provide that foundation – and HealthEdge Professional Services deliver the expertise and support to make the process swift, sure, and effective.

Learn more about HealthEdge Professional Services.

Join us for the rest of the Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation series

 

 

 

 

Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Top 3 Planning Mistakes

The digital transformation shift for payers can represent a massive change. One of the keys to successfully navigating that change is through thorough planning and preparing. However, skipping, or skimping, on the planning phase can cause a ripple of negative outcomes.

Top 3 Most Common Digital Transformation Planning Mistakes

 

1. “Filling in the Blanks”

Insufficient information and lack of goal communication can cause people to make up information in the absence of details. Executive decisions can also be misunderstood by the project/operational teams without sufficient information and context. Proactively share information and bring people along on the journey. Always overcommunicate.

2. Scope Creep

Adding/changing scope without considering its impact to your goals and objectives can cause budget and operational consequences. Establish your scope based on your objectives and goals and stick to it.

3. Job Security Mindset

The fear of being replaced by technology is real for a lot of people. This can cause people to not share legacy information so that they can’t be replaced by technology.

Plan for the Digital Transformation

Don’t fall victim to the “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach. Slow down and build the plan, prepare to initiate the next phase, gather requirements, think about the organizational change that will need to occur, be mindful in your decisions, and build in mitigation plans for critical dependencies and dates. Comprehensive preparation empowers your team to pivot and keep going rather than losing even more time having to do that work later, or possibly redoing it.

Ensure your people, processes, and technology are fully aligned before the project commences. Include the following considerations:

Top 3 Digital Transformation Planning Best Practices: Goals, Objectives, and KPIs

In the words of Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. What do you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve it? What will achieving it mean to your members, your staff, your organization?

Define why you have decided to do this, your business goals and objectives, the current KPIs, and what you expect to achieve after implementing this new solution.

1. Define the Why

What are the business and technology goals behind the decision?

2. Evaluate impact on decisions

What are your goals and objectives? Will this have a positive impact on them? How will this change impact your technology, process, and people?

3. Establish a communication plan

Transparency and communication support the change. Focus on building cascade, transparency, and consensus. Document and publish it. These goals and objectives should become core to how you make decisions about scope and changes throughout the implementation and ongoing management of the solution.

HealthEdge: Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation and Professional Services

HealthEdge’s Professional Services provides expertise and support to accelerate your digital transformation. To become a next-generation health plan, you need a digital foundation that enables you to provide a transparent and person-centric experience at lower cost, higher quality, and higher service levels. HealthEdge® solutions provide that foundation – and HealthEdge Professional Services deliver the expertise and support to make the process swift, sure, and effective.

Learn more about HealthEdge Professional Services.

Join us for the rest of the Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation series

  • Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Navigating Change Through Strategic Planning
  • Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Prepare & Plan
  • Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Design Excellence – coming soon!
  • Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Execute – coming soon!
  • Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: 3 Critical KPIs – coming soon!
  • Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Optimize – coming soon!