Geisinger Consulting Group

geisinger consulting group services

ProvenKnowledgeSM Solutions

To help you succeed as a value-based healthcare organization, we offer services through our ProvenKnowledgeSM solution to address:

Applying Strategies for Physician Alignment and Development

Imminent changes in the payment structure between hospitals and physicians have ignited interest among those groups in re-establishing closer working relationships. While many models exist, hospitals generally are inexperienced at establishing governance, operational and financial models to successfully align with physicians in support of a patient-centered care model. Hospitals risk repeating the mistakes of the 1990s that distanced physicians.

The experienced physician and administrative leaders on the Geisinger ProvenKnowledge team assist hospitals and health systems with establishing governance and compensation strategies for employed group practice models, while maintaining relations with affiliated private practice staff.

ProvenKnowledge services for physician alignment and development include:

  • Baseline performance and gap assessments
  • Executive leadership coaching and mentoring for physician alignment
  • Mission/vision/values development and correlation to physician group structure and governance
  • Compensation and incentive modeling for optimum alignment and focus on outcomes/costs
  • Physician compliance with EHR use
  • Aligning physicians with payors

… and more

Instituting the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model (ProvenHealth Navigator)

The patient-centered medical home is the foundation for managing a population of patients—whether in an ACO, FFS, or capitated model. Geisinger is one of only a few organizations who successfully developed and put into place a model that has improved quality and reduced costs, without relying on a “gatekeeper” system. In addition, our program is unique in its ability to train, certify and deploy nurse case managers as key, embedded elements within the primary care site.

We can scale this nationally recognized medical home model for any organization. Using our proprietary “training and skills transfer” approach, the Geisinger team provides you with expertise in:

  • Patient-centered primary care
  • Population management
  • Value-care systems (“Medical Neighborhood”)
  • Quality improvement plan
  • Value-based reimbursement

Our model includes several levels of service, including:

  • Organizational assessment
  • Content education
  • “Shadowing”, mentoring and coaching
  • Case manager training and certification
  • Primary care site workflow redesign
  • HIT use to support and optimize workflow
  • Toolkits for acute and chronic care management
  • Leadership and management development
  • Coaching for cultural change to make the Medical Home model successful
  • Performance monitoring and management

These services can be scaled based on your organization’s objectives, size, structure, number of facilities, and number of leaders and staff to be trained.

Optimizing Healthcare IT and Electronic Health Records

Having invested more than $100M in healthcare information technology (HIT) during the past 15 years, Geisinger is nationally recognized for its innovative use of healthcare IT and electronic health records (EHR) to improve outcomes, enhance the patient and provider experience, reduce the total costs of health care, improve levels of population health management, and manage data coordination with other providers.

We continuously refine our IT systems to:

  • Provide team-based patient care
  • Engage patients in their care
  • Perform more care outside the office setting
  • Improve patient/provider interactions both in and outside the office
  • Help guide therapeutic choices for in-patient and ambulatory settings to enhance quality, value, and safety

ProvenKnowledge services for optimizing HIT and EHR include:

EHR Assessments:

  • Pre-implementation readiness
  • Post-implementation review

HIT Readiness Assessments and Strategy Development for:

  • Optimization
  • Clinical decision support
  • Accountable care organizations
  • Closing care gaps
  • EHR strategic plan

… and much more

EHR Knowledge Transfer to Accomplish Build and IT Structure for:

  • ProvenCare
  • Medical home
  • Accountable care organizations
  • Closing care gaps
  • Clinical decision support
  • Patient and physician portals

… and much more

EHR and IT Accolades 

Hospitals, medical groups, payors, EHR manufacturers, and consultants look to Geisinger’s nationally recognized IT Services Team for its significant expertise in EHR optimization. Accolades include:

2011 InformationWeek Healthcare CIO 25
Frank Richards, CIO Geisinger Health System

Healthcare’s Most Wired
2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006
Healthcare’s Most Wired Magazine

2007 Computerworld Honors Laureate
"Driving Process Management with Business Intelligence"
Computerworld Magazine 2007

InformationWeek Top 500
Business Technology Innovators
2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004

2006 CEO IT Achievement Award
Modern Healthcare and HIMSS

2003 Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders
Frank Richards, CIO Geisinger Health System
IT Leadership

2002 Wharton/Infosys Business Transformation Award Finalist
Harnessing Technology for Business Transformation
The Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania
Infosys

Implementing Evidence-Based Care (ProvenCare) and Bundled Package Pricing

Improving clinical quality has been Geisinger’s driving organizational strategy for over a decade. Our ProvenCare methodology is an integrative clinical optimization process that rigorously translates evidence-based medicine into actionable, measurable best practices by aligning physicians and other providers, re-designing clinical workflow, and embedding critical actions into technology to reduce practice variation and improve reliability of care. The ProvenCare methodology enables organizations to drive care standardization and integration of care to improve both quality and cost.

ProvenCare Design Elements for Quality Care Delivery

  • Physician engagement – Identify and engage all key providers, define roles and responsibilities at project level.
  • Care re-design based on medical evidence and optimal care coordination 
  • Patient activation – Engage patients in education, self-monitoring and management, and follow up care.
  • Clinical IT optimization for care quality – Leverage EHR and other technologies in both the inpatient and outpatient settings, to ‘hardwire’ organization-defined best practices into reliable care systems.
  • Value capture dashboard – Collect and monitor key metrics such as adherence to best practices, clinical outcomes cost measures.
  • Implement chronic disease and prevention bundles  – Improve outcomes associated with chronic disease and establish the foundation for Patient-Centered Medical Home and financial results share.

            ProvenCare Six-Step Implementation Process

 Provencare®

Referred to by the New York Times as “surgery with a warranty”, ProvenCare, reliably integrates evidence-based best practices into the care delivery process so that every patient receives every element of care, every time. Recognized by the New York Times, Time magazine and The Washington Post, the model features a payer financial arrangement to accept "provider risk" for care related complications.  Results consistently show decreased mortality, decreased rates of infection and other complications, along with a decreased length of stay and decreased readmission rates.  

Far from “cook book medicine”, ProvenCare represents a robust solution for evidence-based care delivery that improves outcomes while reducing costs and complications. 

Improving Clinical Operations Using Strategic Cost Management

Persistent innovation, constant learning, and creative improvements: these are the only ways healthcare organizations will thrive as healthcare reimbursement pressures tighten and quality standards increase.

Geisinger’s ProvenKnowledge Strategic Cost Management service helps you:

  • Engage your entire organization to assess problems, develop strategies, implement solutions, and measure progress using fact-based standards and best practices
  • Build a culture focused on savings and value, with a “bias toward excellence” in every function and task
  • Root out the “hidden cost of care” through relentless improvements in clinical operations, demonstrably elevating quality and reducing mortality — and reducing costs

And the model works: Geisinger has realized cost savings of $100M per year during a three-year period — without relying on workforce reductions.

Enriching Population Health Management

Integrated healthcare organizations face myriad care management responsibilities, including how to deliver value-based care across a continuum of patient types (from healthy to complex critical).

pyramid

 Using our fully integrated structure, we developed best practices and tools to manage significant patient populations (Geisinger covers 42 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties). We distilled our ability to manage utilization while proactively improving patient health into specific Geisinger ProvenKnowledge services to optimize population health management, including:

  • Shared data systems for connectivity and clinical decision support across multiple entities
  • Proprietary actuarial informatics (“AI”)
  • Operational efficiencies to manage and integrate service delivery across the care continuum (Medical home > acute > post-acute) and related specialty care services
  • Payor partnering, compensation management and incentive alignment
  • Staff support (role definition and resource distribution) across the care continuum
  • Care gaps and patient-centered strategies (with particular emphasis on chronic disease management)