As a health delivery organization that is rapidly expanding its accountable care business, Franciscan Alliance Inc. is in need of forward-looking data analytics tools. But instead of a traditional arrangement with a software vendor, it has decided to work with the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), which is working on a suite of analytics tools for its clients.

Mishawaka, Ind.-based Franciscan Alliance is an IHIE client that serves patients in 13 hospitals and numerous medical practices in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. Although it has an enterprise electronic health record and a data warehouse, it hasn’t made much progress on predictive analytics. So far, the data warehouse has been used more for retrospective reporting on quality outcomes.

 “We need tools to do risk stratification and identify those patients who will benefit from a high level of case management,” said Dick Roskam, M.D., Franciscan’s chief medical information officer. “It would be useful to generate a readmission risk score as someone begins a hospital stay so we can target them for immediate case management.”

From Franciscan’s experience, targeted case management is clearly working in terms of lowering costs and improving outcomes, he said.

IHIE has formed a partnership with Predixion Software of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., to develop predictive analytics solutions that will be offered to ACOs and hospitals across Indiana.

Earlier this year, the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute Inc. announced it would license its Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) data repository and DOCS4DOCS clinical results delivery software to an IHIE subsidiary. (The INPC handles more than half a million secure transactions of clinical data every day.)

IHIE has formed a for-profit subsidiary company to expand the use of the technology beyond Indiana’s borders. Curt Sellke, vice president of analytics for IHIE, said that as the organization started developing some analytics offerings, its customers said they especially needed help with predictive analytics. “We did some market research and became interested in Predixion, because it is a young, aggressive company,” he said. (Predixion’s healthcare customers include Aetna, Kaiser Permanente and Carolinas Health System, according to the company.) Sellke added that the IHIE for-profit spin-off is in the final stages of establishing its brand name.

The first module piloted by IHIE will involve Predixion’s Readmission Insight solution to provide ACOs and hospitals with risk stratification information on patients to help them determine intervention opportunities. “We are hoping to start with a readmission solution and then iterate and build other modules,” Sellke said. “The model is to build it once and collaborate rather than each provider having to reinvent it themself.”

Although the pricing model isn’t set yet, it may follow the experience IHIE has with ADT (admission, discharge and transfer) messages, which providers can subscribe to on a per-member, per-month fee basis. “We plan to create an advisory board to help us with ideas about how they want to consume the services,” Sellke said.

Readmission is the real poster child for this type of solution, Roskam said, but there are other types of information ACOs need. “We would like to identify people who are at risk of becoming hypertensive or diabetic in the future,” he added.