As Wellconnex enters the lexicon of healthcare vendors this winter, we are arriving at a time when the needs for population health management solutions within healthcare systems have never been more important.
Even before the COVID pandemic, healthcare systems were increasingly struggling with the large volumes of patients they were serving. The traditional office-based visit as a method of engaging patients and families was increasingly a barrier to effective care, as families and patients were often left disconnected from healthcare teams between visits. Obtaining refills for medications, scheduling regular tests and procedures, or simply obtaining test results had become an albatross even for many of our most prestigious institutions.
The COVID pandemic has exposed these challenges to an even greater extent. Not only have healthcare systems been pressured with caring for COVID and non-COVID patients alike, but they have had to quickly transition to remote visits through telehealth and increase engagement between visits for care management and follow-up. As we move beyond the COVID pandemic, these needs will not change, and the pivot to remote patient engagement will continue to advance rapidly.
The Wellconnex model is based on over a decade of research and development at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). The Wellconnex team, born from the hospital, worked to bring population health management solutions to the forefront of clinical work that aims to improve patient engagement and outcomes, while also improving efficiency of clinical care for front-line providers. By providers, we holistically mean the entire care team of physicians, nurses, office medical assistants, social workers, psychologists, community health workers, and other multidisciplinary roles.
As we began our journey at CHOP, we met with many vendors that aimed to deliver new solutions for population health management. Most of these involved unwieldy and expensive standalone data systems that were heavily focused on integrating insurance claims with clinical management systems. But we quickly realized that dashboarding efficiency metrics and contractual metrics for health system executives, while important, was not solving the tremendous care burden challenges for multidisciplinary team members who were directly serving patients. Those team members were increasingly burning out with new demands for documentation and dashboard responsibilities for metrics that seemed unlinked to their actual care of patients.
What has emerged for us is a new approach that is focused, from the bottom up, on solutions for providers to more efficiently care for their patients. Working with chief information officers and informatics teams, alongside physicians, nurses, social workers, medical assistants, and others, we have deployed quality improvement methods supported by technology to streamline distributed workflows. The emphasis has been on building registries of patients and care management tools and processes using native solutions in the electronic health record—not standalone unwieldy data systems—that would help care teams triage their daily work more effectively. This approach with programs tailored to primary care and chronic disease management – built by leading experts – has allowed them to more effectively schedule outreach for patients, place reminder calls, refill prescriptions, and follow up appropriately on testing and procedures. The result of this quality improvement process has been a library of experience across primary care and specialty care providers, equipping them with the sought-after solutions that actually make a difference in their care of patients. An emphasis on quality improvement methods and outcomes tracked by dashboards has assured that they have achieved the success in patient experience and outcomes they were seeking.
These results have also not been anecdotal. In peer-reviewed evaluation of a comprehensive program of interventions for over 93,000 Medicaid-enrolled patients in the Philadelphia region, our team has demonstrated significant reductions in inpatient utilization and overall health system economic performance compared to community peers. The return on investment to insurers was nearly $6 for every $1 invested in the program. See the manuscript here.
Wellconnex has now launched with the intention of bringing these nimble population health solutions to providers across the country. Our team of clinical, implementation, and technology experts is focused foremost on aligning the work of frontline providers with the desired outcomes of the health system leaders. And creating the work environment that clinicians are seeking as a path out of healthcare burnout. And providing patients with the experience they deserve.
If you are a health system looking for native, nimble solutions within the electronic health record, Wellconnex may be able to help you. We recognize that your electronic health record system may offer solutions that we have become expert at designing and implementing. But these solutions require an expertise and facility that are often not readily available in the current environment of informatics and analytics teams that have many competing demands and a high-turnover workforce. With the urgency to pivot your health system to the types of patient engagement and distributed remote workflow that our team has championed, we hope you will reach out to learn more.
Dave