Finance, Revenue Cycle

Senior executives and quality, clinician, and IT leaders at ThedaCare in Appleton, Wis., have been busy visioning the future, both internally, and collaboratively with leaders of other patient care organizations nationwide. Through the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value, they are collaborating with other leaders nationwide to spur clinical business intelligence-driven performance improvment.

A healthy partnership between accountable care organizations (ACOs) and payers is the linchpin for successfully using the ACO model to better coordinate care, improve population health and reduce care costs. That’s one of the main takeaways of “Transforming Payer Arrangements to Align with New Care Models,” a webinar hosted last week by the Charlotte, N.C.-based Premier healthcare alliance. The webinar’s participants discussed lessons learned from Premier’s Partnership for Care Transformation (PACT) Population Health Collaborative, an initiative launched in 2010.

During the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit that was held June 4-6 in Orlando, Fla., Karen Timberlake, director of the Madison, Wis.-based Partnership for Healthcare Payment Reform, delivered a compelling presentation entitled “Go Big or Go Home: Lessons from Payment Reform Experiments in Wisconsin.” Timberlake shared her perspectives on broad bundled payment-based payment initiatives exclusively with HCI’s Mark Hagland.

Heritage Provider Network, an integrated care delivery network, based out of Northridge, Calif., recently announced the results of an analytics competition it held, handing out a $500,000 award to a team that had come closest to reaching the benchmark it set. The announcement was made at Health Datapalooza IV, in Washington D.C.

Bed management software applications, which are used to manage the use of beds in the hospital, present as a “hot” market for vendors and providers to watch, according to data from the recently released HIMSS Analytics report, "Essentials of the U.S. Hospital IT Market."