ANALYSIS | BY ERIC WICKLUND APRIL 13, 2023
The Utah-based research firm’s annual awards recognize 25 programs launched by health systems and payers that address key issues such as data integration and exchange and value-based care.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- KLAS Research has unveiled its 2023 Points of Light Awards, handed out to innovative partnerships between health systems and payers that address key challenges in healthcare.
- This year’s projects tackle such topics as back-end automation, remote patient monitoring, prior authorization, and value-based care.
- In honoring these programs, KLAS places high value on collaboration, setting up the right governance structure, and using data to drive improved outcomes.
KLAS Research has unveiled its annual Points of Light awards, highlighting 25 innovative partnerships between healthcare organizations, payers, and vendors that have shown success addressing the nation’s biggest healthcare challenges.
The announcement precedes by just a few days the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) 2023 conference in Chicago, and tackles topics that will be front and center at the event, including workforce shortages; data interoperability, exchange and analysis; automating back-end functions; and valuer-based care initiatives.
Among the projects included in this year’s awards is a deviceless remote patient monitoring (RPM) program launched by Illinois-based Carle Health and Health Alliance in a partnership with Lightbeam Health Solutions. The program has shown improved clinical outcomes and reduced monthly costs for a number of patients living at home with hypertension, COPD, and congestive heart failure.
Another project, launched by the Allegheny Health Network and Highmark Health in a partnership with Cedar, consists of a self-pay digital health platform and call center, giving patients real-time access to information including deductible progress, out-of-pocket maximums, and FSA/HAS balances, and a portal through which they can choose a payment plan, pay bills, or seek more information. That program, now being used by one-third of eligible patients, has boosted payments and improved patient engagement and satisfaction.
For each of the profiled programs, KLAS highlights outcomes achieved through collaboration, placing a high value on health systems and payers that work together and with vendors to solve problems. Other key lessons learned included choosing the appropriate technology partners, creating groups and governance structures necessary for success, and using data to drive improved outcomes.
Last year’s KLAS Points of Light winners included Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which launched a maternal health bundled payment program with the Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) health plan and Cedar Gate Technologies that helped save more than $400,000 in its first year.
“People don’t feel like their health systems are going with them on their journey,” CJ Stimson, MD, JD, chief medical officer at VUMC and Vanderbilt University Employee Health Plans and senior vice president of value transformation in VUMC’s Office of Population Health, said in a HealthLeaders interview. “So we told them we’ll take all the risk.”
