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Weaving the "Fabric of Care"

There have been a lot of varied models of care management for many years now that are described by terms like Health Homes, Patient Centric Medical Homes, Primary Care, Managed Care, Accountable Care, etc. One thing I have noticed is that the industry seems to skim over the fact that this cannot be a patchwork quilt of care. It needs to be a woven fabric of care that can be cut and sewn into varied models through mass customization. We cannot expect that a provider is going to function differently if the patient in front of them is enrolled in a particular program or not. That certainly isn't going to create administrative efficiencies; quite the opposite. If they have to capture different information, provide different information, or provide different treatment based on how care is paid for; they will certainly be less efficient due to administrative burdens. Therefore, the customization needs to happen in the background as part of the ACO business processes.
 

Business process management (BPM) is the loom

 
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the well-architected HIE is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and implements an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The HIE's ESB is essentially a "Healthcare Process Manager" and provides the ability for organizations to define business processes, otherwise known as "orchestrations", to automate care coordination activities based on events. HIEs provide the event notifications. The orchestrations, usually developed in Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), apply business rules to an event to decide to trigger additional events that drive action or care intervention. For instance, a patient is discharged from a hospital; this can trigger an event for follow-up appointment scheduling. It also may reset the clock on one or more quality measures. Based on either the immediate event (visit) or subsequent time based events (falling out of quality compliance if no more visits) intervention can be driven.
 

Business activity monitoring (BAM) cuts the fabric

 
While BPM allows the implementation of new business processes to manage care, without impeding on those providing care to perform varied activities based on compensation models, BAM lets you grade the effectiveness of those processes and business rules. With BAM we can answer questions like; How many patients are compliant now versus before a change?; How many patients have been readmitted with avoidable conditions based on our business rules?; and How have these changes over time as we change our business processes? This "Healthcare Activity Monitoring" provides the platform for answering all of these questions and driving action to change processes based on results.
 

Dashboards for care managers sew together a finished product

 
The above are implementations of existing abstract technologies for Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). The HIE differentiator comes from using its real-time data feeds to provide services like real-time quality reporting based on standard business rules for healthcare such as NQF quality measures. Additionally, BPM and BAM can provide the flexibility for power-users to define custom business rules and dashboards. Hence, the HIE portal platform can be extended as an application for triggering care coordination through event alerts and quality reporting dashboard mash-ups that meet individual needs.

Why the finished product is better than the patchwork


What we enable using the SOA/ESB based HIE (BPM, BAM, and mashups as needed) to abstract between program management and care delivery is an environment where care is delivered in a uniform manner.

  • With our finished product the management (definition, monitoring, and change) of the programs is on the program managers and not the care delivery. Mass customization using BPEL and mashups allows for many programs to be defined and manages without creating undue burdens. The patchwork alternative puts custom systems in place for every program and undue burdens on care delivery.
  • With  our finished product the patient gets a uniform message from care delivery based on information sharing, including patient history, quality measure compliance, and treatment plans. Thus, the patient can be guided towards the same quality care at any and every point in care.
I suggest that as new ACO and Healthplan programs are launched, they should look first to how they will use a SOA/ESB based central HIE to enable the program rather than put in another silo solution intended to support one programs need.

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