VHA IMPERATIV™ Advantage adds physician dashboards to help drive physician alignment, accelerate engagement

IRVING, Texas, April 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- VHA Inc., the national health care network, has added physician dashboards to enhance VHA IMPERATIV™ Advantage, its comprehensive performance improvement solution. The new dashboards and advisory services help health care organizations accelerate physician engagement and make it is easier for hospital executives to work with physician leaders to understand the clinical, quality and financial impact caused by variation in care.

"Hospitals across the country are embracing physician alignment models as a way to improve quality and reduce costs. By adding physician dashboards to VHA IMPERATIV Advantage, hospital executives and service line leaders have the information they need to understand utilization, reduce variation and work together to improve patient outcomes," said Steve Miff, PhD, senior vice president, VHA's Clinical and Care Delivery Solutions. "In addition, VHA's expert advisors work with physician leaders to help them assess their data, create action plans that address practice patterns and utilization, and monitor the progress of their integration and alignment models."

VHA IMPERATIV Advantage is a subscription-based solution that includes advisory services and leading practice knowledge to help hospitals engage physicians on improvements like changes in practice patterns and utilization. It leverages transactional-level data through Truven Health Analytics™ and UHC. VHA's intuitive, graphic dashboards provide a snapshot of the most important results and data comparisons, before drilling down into the powerful benchmarking and reporting capabilities found in the Truven Health and UHC tools.

As an integrated performance platform, VHA IMPERATIV Advantage gives hospital executive teams information to align service lines in a highly matrixed environment. The new physician-focused view encourages physician leaders to examine their doctors' clinical performance in comparison with the same severity-adjusted data, both in the hospital and across the nation. The physician dashboards then tie to other clinical, financial and operational measures, providing CEOs, CFOs and CMOs valuable information about overall system performance.

With the guidance of VHA's dedicated advisors and physician expertise, health care providers use this comprehensive presentation of data to identify areas with the greatest improvement needs. They also can access leading practice knowledge resources and collaborate on improvement initiatives that accelerate performance of their enterprise.

"The industry's transition to an outcomes-based environment has placed increased emphasis on transparency and outcomes reporting," said Robert Dean, D.O., vice president of clinical affairs and performance improvement in the VHA Central region. "The new physician dashboards make is easier for physician leaders and hospitals to create customized care groups around CPT codes, enabling more veracity and applicability across like specialists with similar practices."   

The VHA IMPERATIV Advantage physician dashboards also enable physicians to address the care needs of specific high-risk and high-priority populations by providing multiple filters to track patients. Physician leaders can select a performance comparison group, which helps identify variation across facilities, within or outside of their organization, and also look at patient populations based on case type and severity based on DRG or CPT codes. The dashboards were developed with clinical leaders in 14 hospitals who served as advisors on the design model and provided feedback on prototypes.

VHA IMPERATIV Advantage is a comprehensive solution that integrates hospital and physician view dashboards to provide hospital executives, clinicians, service line leaders, performance improvement and quality staff with online access to the same trustworthy data analytics on physician- and patient-level data across multiple domains. With integrated views, the solution provides a bridge for hospitals and physician leaders to understand practice variations and their impact on cost, quality and outcomes.

About VHA
VHA Inc., based in Irving, Texas, is a national network of not-for-profit health care organizations that work together to drive maximum savings in the supply chain arena, set new levels of clinical performance, and identify and implement best practices to improve operational efficiency and clinical outcomes. Since 1977, VHA has leveraged its expertise in analytics, contracting, consulting and networks to help members achieve their operational, clinical and financial objectives. In 2011, VHA delivered record savings and value of $1.9 billion to members. VHA serves more than 1,350 hospitals and more than 72,000 non-acute care providers nationwide, coordinating delivery of its programs and services through its 13 regional offices. For more information, visit www.vha.com and follow us on Twitter (@VHAInc).

SOURCE VHA Inc.