NextGen EHR Clients Participating with an ACO

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) offers clinicians, groups, hospitals, and other healthcare providers the opportunity to form Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). CMS has several  ACO programs depending on your location, patient population, and prior ACO experience. Private payers also have ACO programs to increase the value of patient care. All ACOs strive to provide high-quality, coordinated care for patients while lowering costs. Participating in an ACO can have significant benefits. For example, ACOs can improve your patients' outcomes and increase your revenue through shared savings. But participating in an ACO requires investment. To ensure high-quality, coordinated care in your ACO, you need to gather, track, and share patient data with NextGen EHR and TempDev.

Here's how you can get the most out of your ACO participation with TempDev's NextGen EHR consulting services.  

NextGen EHR ACO Participation Requires Comprehensive, Consistent Data

ACOs are designed to provide better care at a lower cost through care coordination and chronic condition management. To coordinate care, participating groups and hospitals must share data. Additionally, ACO participants need data to manage patients' chronic conditions, medications, and care needs. Medicare ACOs must also report Electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) to CMS under the Quality Payment Program (QPP) to be eligible for shared savings. 

Your NextGen EHR can help you manage the basic functions of ACO participation. These include coordinating care, improving patient outcomes, and complying with quality reporting requirements. TempDev's NextGen EHR templates, reports, and consulting services can help you streamline workflows and patient enrollment; improve patient care; and track and report quality data. 

Streamline Workflows and Patient Enrollment

Through its ACO programs, CMS is shifting Medicare payment from fee-for-service to fee-for-value. Private payer's ACO programs have similar goals. Navigating the shift to value-based medicine may require technical changes in your practice. For example, participating in an ACO may mean shifting your business focus from patient volume to quality and cost. TempDev can help you design, implement, and optimize your NextGen EHR workflows to meet your existing system's strategic, business, operational, and financial goals. 

Additionally, TempDev has developed NextGen EHR templates, reports, and SQL jobs to help streamline patient enrollment and patient tracking. These services will help you enroll and track ACO patients automatically. You can also stratify patients as needed to direct ACO resources appropriately. These TempDev solutions include the following: 

• Patient Enrollment Status & Stratification Indication

• NextGen Patient Portal® Auto Enrollment SQL jobs

Improving Patient Care

To coordinate and improve care in an ACO, you need the following: patient screening, chronic condition management, patient engagement, attention to population health, and adherence to care guidelines. TempDev can help you customize your NextGen EHR to meet all of these goals. 

• Patient screening: TempDev's consultants can build the required patient screening questionnaires and health risk assessments (HRA) into your NextGen EHR for seamless documentation. These questionnaires can help you track medical history, flag chronic conditions, stratify patients, and identify patient goals. 

• Chronic condition management: Using TempDev's Chronic Condition Management templates, you can manage and coordinate care for patients with chronic conditions, a key goal of ACO programs. These templates will help you improve health outcomes for patients with chronic conditions, increasing your quality scores, and saving you money. 

• Patient engagement: Engaging patients in their care is critical for ACO success. With NextGen Patient Portal or Medfusion, you can give your patients direct access to their medical records. You can also provide secure messaging, prescription refill requests, and appointment scheduling tools. These tools empower patients to participate more actively in their care, improving outcomes. 

• Tracking population health: By coordinating care, ACOs are expected to improve population health. Business intelligence, NextGen Care, or a population health solution coupled with NextGen EHR, can easily track your patient population's health, allowing you to see your population trends. TempDev can help you select and implement the appropriate business intelligence or population health system for NextGen EHR, keeping your practice on track to meet its goals. 

• Adherence to care guidelines: One of the major benefits of EHRs is their ability to improve patient care by improving adherence to clinical guidelines. ACOs also seek to ensure guidelines-based care through care coordination and data sharing. TempDev can help you configure and customize care guidelines within your NextGen EHR to ensure adherence to evidence-based care throughout your group and ACO. 

Tracking and Reporting Quality Data

The CMS Quality Payment Program (QPP) requires reporting of eCQMs to monitor quality and determine shared savings or bonus payments. Private payers also require quality data from ACO participants. Your NextGen EHR can help you monitor quality data in near real-time and report them with ease. Use TempDev's Quality Measures NextGen EHR template and reports to improve your clinical quality measures, such as the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS). 

Reporting quality data is not enough to maximize your ACO success, however. You also need to monitor your performance throughout the year, identify areas for improvement, and take action to increase lagging quality scores. TempDev's NextGen EPM and EHR business intelligence reporting will help you evaluate your performance on ACO, Quality Payment Program (QPP), and HEDIS measures. With the Quality Measures Dashboard, you will be able to see everything in one place and immediately take action on lagging measures at the patient level. Your NextGen EHR can reduce quality measures monitoring complexity and time, making it as simple as possible to manage quality and give clinical staff timely feedback to improve quality scores. 

The TempDev Difference

TempDev consultants have deep experience helping clinicians and groups implement and customize NextGen EHR to meet their needs. TempDev has a broad suite of NextGen template and reporting solutions to ease your ACO reporting burdens, improve patient outcomes, and help you save time and money. TempDev consultants can also help you optimize workflows to improve patient care and meet or exceed ACO performance thresholds.

Call us at 888.TEMP.DEV, or contact us here to get started improving your ACO experience by customizing your NextGen EHR.