Unprecedented change is driving healthcare today. The shift from fee-for-service to fee-for-value requires ongoing commitment to improved quality and reduced costs. Across the continuum of care, both public and private payers are hardwiring payment to demonstrated quality and performance.

Healthcare leaders are seeking solutions that will help them respond to new care and reimbursement paradigms such as value-based purchasing, shared savings contracts, and incentive programs such as Meaningful Use—and anticipate what’s coming next.

Encore's unique Value-based Performance Improvement (VPI) lifecycle of services and software tools assists healthcare organizations meet and exceed thresholds for quality and performance measures to obtain incentives and avoid penalties. It includes all the components required for the full performance improvement lifecycle to improve quality, manage costs, and ensure continued and improved reimbursements.

What is the continuous performance improvement lifecycle?

It’s an enterprise-wide strategy for clinical and financial performance improvement, based on clearly defined quality data, performance measures and thresholds. Integral to the lifecycle is certified EHR technology that captures the right information within the appropriate workflow—and makes it available for data aggregation and reporting. Robust analytics serve as the capstone, enabling healthcare systems to identify and implement critical modifications—and then monitor and track progress for continuous improvement.

Encore VPI is the only comprehensive solution in the market that addresses each stage of the lifecycle. We help our clients identify qualifying measures…ensure their systems capture and map important data…design IT systems for optimal workflow and functionality…apply 'smart, skinny' analytics for organizational insight and operational intelligence…and leverage that intelligence to systematically manage performance improvement to achieve outcomes in an infinite feedback loop.

Encore VPI Key Differentiators

Speed to results. Flexible, scalable components with simple vendor neutral data tools enable you to start now and capitalize on any existing BI investments to accelerate gathering the health intelligence you need.

Targeted Data. Services and tools focused on getting the source data right for measures pertinent to quality improvement, payment and reimbursement - focusing on the data that matters in the sea of 'big data'.

Scalability. Encore’s VPI solution is designed with the future in mind. We build with the flexibility to quickly address new requirements and measures as they emerge.

Dashboards. Our easy-to-use dashboards quickly and efficiently give healthcare leaders the information they need to drive improvement back into the relevant processes that affect patient care and the financial future of the organization.

Full life cycle solution. Encore provides the services and tools you need to manage and support all your performance-improvement requirements to continuously achieve optimal results in a new and evolving healthcare world – for today and the future.

4 Steps in the Value-based Performance Improvement Lifecycle Solution

Encore VPI is built on decades of experience, in-depth knowledge of clinical data, and unsurpassed healthcare expertise. Four mission-critical elements comprise our approach:

Step 1: Advise

Encore helps clients assess enterprise information-based capabilities required to track, manage and improve performance, allowing them to meet strategic business goals and evolving regulatory requirements. We leverage CoreQUEST®, our proven methodology, and CoreGPS®, our data tool to enable and document comparisons of certified EHR system functionality, build, content process and workflow against each defined Meaningful Use and other performance/quality requirements. We prepare a comprehensive IT strategy and roadmap that enables clients to meet quality and performance measures for commercially contracted and/or government incentive programs, start receiving incentive payments, and share in savings down the line.

Step 2: Implement

Encore provides clients with extensive application and rich operational experience, with scores of consultant resources including MDs, RNs, RPhs and MBAs. Our implementation and optimization teams, supporting most major EHR vendors throughout the lifecycle, assist healthcare organizations in not only implementing, but leveraging their IT investments by building the right workflow to capture the right content to enable the analytical capabilities to support evolving regulatory, clinical and financial performance-improvement requirements.

Our methodology framework—CoreQUEST® —and our data tool —CoreGPS®— bring a level of granularity unmatched by other implementation methods, capturing the right data with the right workflow from the beginning. Recognizing the time and effort—and correlating cost—involved in implementation projects, we establish an information foundation that positions healthcare systems to meet future requirements, avoiding unnecessary (or costly) rework.

Step 3: Analyze

The CoreANALYTICS™ suite drives Encore VPI, capturing specific quality and performance data from a variety of source systems without the burden of operational noise - confirmng source data in both structure and nomenclature.

Encore’s exclusive Analytics Engine, enriches information through in-situ data derivation and measure calculations. It is supported by our data tool and proprietary measures knowledge base, CoreGPS® (business specifications, meta data and rules), which, in turn, informs Analytics Measures specifications (analytics code and calculations). This intuitive functionality enables automatic and dynamic updates to the Analytics Engine, external of a data warehouse—eliminating the need for resource-intensive custom coding for every new measure and calculation.

By retaining the relationship of summarized, aggregated information with the underpinning detail fact evidence, data is then transformed into actionable intelligence with detail drill down dashboard to understand current performance from an entity level down to individual providers, clinics, and hospitals for all patient populations or segmented cohorts.

The result? A smart, skinny, lower-cost analytics solution focused only on pertinent data that can play with any existing analytics/BI investments or serve as your focused BI solution to accelerate delivery of insightful business intelligence.

Step 4: Improve

Perhaps the most important facet of the continuous performance improvement lifecycle is turning knowledge into results. Computing scorecards provide concise views of measures and trends enabling focus on areas for improving performance. Analysis reports provide detail to identify success patterns or support root-cause analysis. Information can be organized for attestation and contract progress reporting.

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