Accountable care organizations report difficulty in accessing data outside the organization and data integration as their top two challenges in a new survey from the eHealth Initiative.
Though 62 percent of the 69 ACOs responding to the survey said that integrating data is getting easier in primary care--and a like percentage said so of lab results--behavioral health, long-term care and home health agencies were among the least likely to be integrated with an ACO.
Kevin Attride, director of clinical health outcomes at AMITA Health in the Chicago area, said in a webinar that it's transitioning from a fee-for-service model "with a foot in two different canoes," and the survey highlights those difficulties for ACOs.
"HIT is one of the biggest hurdles, and it takes more than just claims to do this well," he said. "Physicians are interested in helping patients in a new way, but there are a lot of struggles when incentives aren't aligned."
Bryan Bowles, vice president of solutions marketing for population Health at Premier, called the difficulties in bringing together independent physicians and other diverse provider organizations "the dirty secret with ACOs."
"Building that neighborhood, operationalizing the day, bringing it in day-to-day workflow has been a real challenge," he said on the webinar. Bowles also pointed to a lack of backing for ACOs, as well as a shortage of experienced professionals in data modeling and other disciplines to put trustworthy data together.
The respondents most often used analytics to: identify gaps in care (84 percent), identify outliers in cost/utilization (80 percent), compare clinician performance (77 percent), measure/report on quality (77 percent) and proactively identify risk (68 percent).
Easier HIT capabilities will be required to more effectively integrate behavioral health, post-acute and home health data and for more precise risk identification, including patient reported data and patient-centric registries, according to the survey.
The results echo themes from eHealth Initiative's survey last year, which found that ACOs had made little progress in improving their health IT capabilities in the year prior.
A study from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that successful ACOs require comprehensive and integrated data and analytic systems that provide meaningful population data in real-time to care teams, promote quality improvement and monitor spending trends.
To learn more:
- check out the survey slides (.pdf)
- listen to the webinar