Phytel, a company that provides automated population health improvement services, has just announced that ThedaCare Physicians, the clinic division within ThedaCare's healthcare organization, has called upon Phytel to assist it in managing population health and acquiring National Committee for Quality Assurance recognition for its patient-centered medical homes (PCMH).
A PCMH is an institution in which different healthcare professionals sort of "team up" to assist a patient in a way that is more coherent and looks as the patient in a "big picture" fashion, as opposed to taking care of one specialty (such as a cardiologist only having a look at the patient's heart). This provides much more efficient care to patients. Phytel will help Thedacare because of the NCQA's credit for providers who use Phytel to meet their requirements.
Professionals working within ThedaCare will use Phytel's solution first to identify patients that have gaps in their care plans and notify them of the gaps. ThedaCare wants to get this done with all its care providers, totalling more than 200 providers using the solution.
ThedaCare sees Phytel as a way to complete its goals for population health management and reforming its processes for care. Phytel will stand as a component that adds to ThedaCare's disease registries and electronic health records to assist the organization in getting its certification for patient-centered medical homes that it operates. It also wants to build an accountable care organization and completely transform its primary care model through this solution.
Jenny Redman Schell, COO at ThedaCare, said in a statement, "Our internal registries and the health maintenance prompts in our EHR have helped us improve the quality of care, as reflected in our high scores in the rankings of the Wisconsin Healthcare Quality Collaborative. But there are still care gaps we can proactively address with the patients in our community. We do really well in providing appropriate care to the patients who visit their providers regularly. Phytel can help us engage those people we haven't seen in a long time and allow us to create a more robust approach to population management. We have our internal processes and our EHR, but if we want to really manage our population's health, we'll need additional tools like what Phytel offers."
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
