The Airport Model: An Innovative Approach to Value-Based Healthcare

By Pranam Ben

With a current total spend of $3.3 trillion that is estimated to balloon to $5.5 trillion by 2025, the healthcare industry is in the midst of an uncontrollable spiral-especially since $750 billion of the outlay is spent on duplicative or unnecessary services. Even though the transition to value-based care was supposed to stem the tide of healthcare spending while maintaining quality, it's had a rocky start due to evolving regulatory pressures, increasing consumerism, an aging patient population and a flourishing mergers and acquisitions market-all of which are compelling organizations to rethink the way they deliver care.

Let's stop and take stock for a minute
To gain a better understanding of what's needed to re-vision healthcare, we must take a step back and consider what the ideal state would look like. In a perfect world, every one of the various ecosystems-hospitals, specialists, primary care providers, laboratories, pharmacies and so on-would seamlessly work together with the patient at the center, sharing data in meaningful and actionable ways to enable proactive and compassionate care and timely, targeted interventions that meet the needs of high-risk patients.

This end goal is a lot closer than people realize. It involves operationalizing a model that connects all stakeholders in a health delivery organization and aligns them around the patient. Think of it like an airport that has different concourses, terminals and gates that come together to ensure the traveler (the patient) moves from Point A to Point B in the right way, at the right time and for the right reasons. Care coordination, patient engagement, reports and analytics, and population health "terminals" are all part of the airport, feeding into a value-based care hub that encircles the patient, making certain he or she arrives safely at his or her "destination."

The right platform can bring the airport model to life

To make the airport model a reality, organizations must have access to an integrated platform that enables easy, seamless and secure patient information exchange and data-driven decision making. The Garage's Bridge platform is designed with these goals in mind. It uses the latest technologies to rapidly and accurately aggregate data from multiple sources-even those outside the organization-and delivers meaningful insights about the patient at the point of decision-making, focusing provider attention on the right information to ensure high-value patient care. The platform helps paint a fuller picture of a patient's health and service utilization, allowing providers to make more informed decisions and better manage risk. It also serves as a collaboration tool, uniting providers to address patient needs and reducing the likelihood of care duplication and unnecessary testing.

Organizations currently using the Bridge platform are seeing transformative results. For example, SOMOS, New York's largest multi-cultural physician-led network serving Latino and Asian-American populations, uses the platform to integrate all providers, patients and population health solutions into one knowledge engine for advanced data analytics and centralized care management, helping providers across the organization improve care quality for some of New York's most vulnerable patients. Similarly, Prime Accountable Care LLC, based in Southfield, Michigan, uses Bridge to easily and rapidly gauge performance across cost and quality KPIs, especially among its high-risk patients. If a negative trend is emerging, the organization can quickly identify the causes and work with the physician or practice to intervene. This approach has helped them reverse the tide from a poor start as an ACO into a high performance organization demonstrating cost savings and high quality compliance.

Transforming healthcare is not easy, and there are no quick fixes. However, by thinking outside the box and using the latest technology to pursue a model that demands robust provider collaboration and data sharing around patient needs, organizations can start to make progress. The ultimate goal of this work is to achieve more integrated, value-driven and patient-focused care experiences that improve clinical outcomes, boost patient and provider satisfaction and reduce the costs of care.

For more information about how the Garage is preparing organizations for a better future, download this e-book today.

This blog is based on a presentation given by Pranam Ben, CEO of The Garage, at Healthfirst's 2019 Fall CME Conference.