Children's Health Alliance Selects Wellcentive to Support Clinical Quality Improvement Programs for Pediatric Patients

ATLANTA, June 2, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The Children's Health Alliance, a not‐for‐profit association of clinically integrated, independent primary care pediatricians, has selected Wellcentive's suite of population health management solutions and services to support its clinical quality improvement and high-function medical home programs caring for pediatric patients with complex medical conditions.

The implementation of the Wellcentive solution, which will be extended to The Alliance's more than 100 pediatricians across five counties in the Portland and Salem, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington metropolitan areas, will provide an unprecedented view into a broader range of data affecting the health of their patients. Wellcentive will aggregate clinical data from specialists and other outside providers and services as well as information from claims through payers, helping pediatricians to proactively engage with their patients and coordinate continuity of care more effectively. 

"After focusing many quality improvement efforts on care management of children across our communities, our pediatricians have difficulty seeing the complete picture of their young patients," said Deborah Rumsey, executive director of The Children's Health Alliance and The Children's Health Foundation. "Because of how care is administered in silos within our fragmented U.S. healthcare system, providers often have minimal visibility into other areas of a child's care and knew that gaining a 360-degree view was critical to better outcomes. Wellcentive gives us the means to address the broader scope of population health management that potentially could impact children and families significantly, even beyond the Pacific Northwest."

"We are proud to support The Alliance, as Wellcentive's population health management technology will help those dedicated care teams enhance patient engagement and care outcomes," said Tom Zajac, Wellcentive's CEO. "The Alliance physicians will have a single, integrated solution delivering population and patient care insights allowing them to deliver the highest level of comprehensive healthcare services for children."

Over the last five years The Alliance laid the groundwork for PHM starting with a pediatric asthma patient registry and pediatric-specific asthma care management measures. To take their PHM initiative to the next level accommodating more conditions, The Alliance reviewed tools aggregating data from clinical, claims, patient registry, educational institutions and other data sets before narrowing its search to those driven from the clinical provider perspective. It was Wellcentive's willingness to customize its flexible solutions to create workflows and build pediatric content and care alerts in partnership with The Alliance's experience in PHM quality measures for the pediatric setting that cemented the final solution selection.

"Current population health management tools are designed for adult patients," said Rumsey. "But children are not just small adults; even if the disease is similar, such as diabetes, the protocols and measures are different because they are still in the growth and development phase. Wellcentive is working with our pediatricians to develop tools for monitoring, risk stratifying and closing care gaps within a pediatric population. By the time it is implemented in late summer we'll have the first population health management tool specific to the care needs of children and adolescents."

The Wellcentive solution will enable pediatric providers to document patient support factors and clinical care measures not easily organized in most electronic health record systems; for example, a support factor could be whether the patient uses a wheelchair or hearing aid device and its impact on the child's need for additional coordination support from their pediatric medical home.

The Wellcentive solution is being launched without government and payer financial incentives.

"Developing population health management strictly around quality improvement, and in advance of payments to compensate for it, is a different approach than that of the conventional reimbursement standard," explained Julie Harris, director of quality programs at The Alliance. "We believed it was important to equip our providers with tools to drive a higher standard of care, and that this would help demonstrate the value of proactive pediatric care management. It would also help payers recognize the value of quality improvement innovations and measures driven from the point of care."

Continuing, Harris said, "Wellcentive gives us that ability to start at the patient level to determine what's actionable and measurable for pediatric care, and then aggregate that data upward, across practices and populations, to drive continuous improvement and ensure every child receives the highest level of care."

About The Children's Health Alliance

The Children's Health Alliance (CHA) is a clinically integrated group of independent primary care pediatricians with a culture of improvement aiming to raise the quality of care for children.  It was established in 1998 because a group of providers recognized the value of focusing on the unique care approaches in pediatric health care. More than 15 years later, it includes 105 primary care pediatricians across five counties in the Portland/Vancouver and Salem metropolitan areas.  The Alliance's goal is to raise the standard of care across members through collaboration, the spread of evidence-based practices, and mutual accountability affecting all children for whom they provide care. For more information about The Alliance, please visit www.ch-alliance.org/.  For more information about pediatric quality programs driven by The Alliance pediatricians, please visit the Children's Health Foundation at www.ch-foundation.org.

About Wellcentive

Built from the ground up to help customers improve clinical, financial and human outcomes, Wellcentive's population health management technology is cloud-based, scalable, and customized to meet the needs of providers, health organizations and payers. Wellcentive's technology, insight and services help care teams measure and report performance and implement actionable workflow to drive value-based reimbursement and the transition from volume to value. Wellcentive has gained recognition as a leader in population health management in reports recently released by IDC Health, KLAS and Chilmark. Wellcentive aggregates data from more than 3,000 interfaces, and its solutions improve outcomes for over 23 million lives. Visit www.wellcentive.com; follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook; or call 877-213-8456 to learn more.

For more information:
Kristi Johnson
Wellcentive
678.710.2008
[email protected]

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SOURCE Wellcentive