SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Collective Medical today announced enhanced platform functionality to help health plans and accountable care organizations (ACOs) readily share member population information with care teams at the point of care. Collective’s generally available Flags feature, with first-to-market functionality, allows these same organizations to contribute data and notes for large groups of their members, or for their individual patients, and to automatically distribute this across their provider networks to ensure that these high value insights show in front of the provider, within workflow at the point of care, to enhance patient care and improve outcomes.
As a use case example, with Collective’s Flags feature, health plans can let care teams know if a patient is a part of a population that has been prescribed “Triple Threat” medications—the concurrent use of opioids, benzodiazepines and muscle relaxants—to help avoid a potentially fatal outcome. Likewise, Flags can be used to disseminate information about members identified to have a multi-drug resistant organism (MDRO) in order to enable physicians, nurses and other care team members to treat appropriately or prevent future spread. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least two million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and 23,000 people die each year as a result.
Collective is partnered with every national health plan and serves payers across all lines of business, including Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, Administrative Services and commercial. Recently, Collective received a five out of five star rating by the Medicaid Black Book as a vendor partner for Medicaid health plans. Payers working across all lines of business work with Collective to identify and manage complex and vulnerable patient populations through real-time collaboration with care teams.
This collaboration is made easier with Flags. With Flags, health plans can effectively distribute insights, applicable both to sizeable member populations and individuals, to the physicians and care team members best positioned to act on that information. Instead of depending on unreliable, ineffective or inefficient communication channels—such as phone calls, emails and faxes—plans now have a streamlined way to share information in real-time, automatically and at scale. Care teams who have active relationships with a member in a group have visibility into contextualized, clinically relevant information such as triple threat care guidelines, program assignments, care gaps and housing prioritization—all displayed directly at the point of care, in real time, within their EMR or care management workflow.
“Our care coordination staff has access to over 10 applications to obtain information on our members and the Collective platform has allowed us to easily prioritize and collaborate with our providers and our outreach attempts to our at-risk members,” says Summer Sweet, triage and data integration manager at CareOregon, a 300,000-member health plan serving both Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries. “We have access to tons of information on our members, but we didn’t have an easy way of communicating that information with providers. The ability to unify our efforts and flag our shared members will be a huge relief to our already busy care managers. We’re excited to have this functionality at CareOregon to collaborate more closely with providers for better member outcomes.”
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice estimates that $700 billion—or 30 percent—of all Medicare clinical spending could be avoided. The lack of care coordination and subsequent gaps in care is responsible for $25 to $45 billion of this sum in wasteful spending.
“Flags is a population management tool designed to work on behalf of each individual patient,” says Mandira Singh, head of product at Collective Medical. “Health plans have always had access to internal insights and groupings with relevant member information that could be of high clinical value, but had no way of readily sharing that with physicians, nurses, case managers, social workers and other members of the care team. With Flags, plans have a direct line of communication to literally flag critical protocols and other high-value information to better support members while they are sitting in front of their provider.”
“Health plans are key members of the patient care team, but they and their data are frequently underutilized when coordinating care with that same team. Flags fixes this. It highlights essential insights to help the provider make better informed and more efficient decisions faster,” says Chris Klomp, CEO of Collective Medical. "Our objective is to enable communities to come together to collectively care for the needs of the individual. Collective is committed to developing lasting solutions that facilitate seamless collaboration between health plans and care teams in this pursuit, and Flags fundamentally changes the way these groups understand and engage with individuals who previously slipped through the cracks.”
Learn more about Collective’s impact at www.collectivemedical.com/health-plans
ABOUT COLLECTIVE MEDICAL
Collective Medical empowers care teams to improve patient outcomes by closing the communication gaps that undermine patient care. With a nationwide network engaged with every national health plan in the country, hundreds of hospitals and health systems and tens of thousands of providers, Collective’s system-agnostic platform is trusted by care teams to identify at-risk and complex patients and facilitate actionable collaboration to make better care decisions and improve outcomes. Based in Salt Lake City, Collective is proven to streamline transitions of care, improve coordination across diverse care teams, and reduce medically unnecessary hospital admissions. Learn more at www.collectivemedical.com and Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
