The Oregon coordinated care organization lines up care plans, goals and tasks to keep care teams and members on track and on the same page.
Coos Bay, Oregon-based Advanced Health is a coordinated care organization serving Coos and Curry Counties. It connects members to medical, dental, behavioral health and substance use treatment through local collaboration and innovation.
THE PROBLEM
As a coordinated care organization, Advanced Health is tasked with coordinating what’s known as “whole person care” for its members. The organization had relied on phone calls, faxes, secured e-mails and meetings to do this work, but knew it needed a more efficient, effective and standardized way to conduct its business.
“With the 2020 CCO 2.0 contract, we had a requirement to share member care plans among different team members,” said Leah Lorcinz, director of member services at Advanced Health. “We also needed to gather social determinants of health data for reporting to the state and informing our community.”
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There are a number of IT platforms designed for population health management; however, it was imperative that a tool be easily accessible by all members of a care team, which includes community-based organizations, clinics and a number of other agencies, said Ross Acker, director of care coordination at Advanced Health.
“We needed these organizations to buy into the tool so that everyone would be willing to use it,” he explained. “It was important that it not look or feel like an electronic health record so that our new traditional healthcare workforce, the member and their family would feel comfortable using the tool. Empowering and encouraging the participation of our members in their own care was an ultimate goal.”
PROPOSAL
Advanced Health determined Activate Care was a good fit for its needs. Activate Care is a vendor of community care coordination and referral management technology to coordinate all of a person’s health, behavioral and social care needs on one platform.
“First, it is a cloud-based technology,” Lorcinz noted. “This is important, since we planned to collaborate and coordinate with many different organizations. The other organizations would have no real IT investment in terms of time or money, so it was user-friendly for them.”
Second, the tool centers on the concept of a shared care plan, she continued.
“This means the care plan can be viewed, edited and worked on by many people, depending on the permission level of the user,” she explained. “It was important that the tool have various ways to protect the member’s protected health information (PHI). The vendor has ‘permission levels’ that dictate what different users can see.”
Source: Healthcare IT News