SAN FRANCISCO - A collaboration between NantHealth and Blue Shield of California announced in early October will see the two organizations develop a clinic-based continuous learning center (CLC) that will leverage supercomputing systems, high-speed, secure-fiber networks and fact-based genomic data systems, which will allow healthcare organizations to provide personalized, evidence-based treatments.
The CLC is set to launch Jan. 1, as part of a new accountable care organization (ACO) that Blue Shield is forming with Access Health and Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif.
The goal of the CLC is to provide better, more precise information culled from health plan, provider and medical literature data to provide more coordinated and timely care to patients. It is also intended to provide Blue Shield of California with a single, customizable technology platform that it can offer to its ACO partners.
According to Simon Jones, director of ACO technology and program strategy at Blue Shield of California, the company began searching last summer for a technology partner that could help it develop a more comprehensive enabling technology.
Speaking about Blue Shield's current ACO partners, Jones said, "they have been very successful despite the lack of technology with limited data sets and limited technologies of the sort that do the thing they need to do to provide better care within the context of the ACOs."
"So we looked at that and asked: what should an optimally functioning ACO look like? And from that we crafted a vision of what our vision was and worked with our providers to make sure it was in line with their expectations," Jones continued.
The search led the insurer to NantHealth, a subsidiary of NantWorks, and its cloud-based platform that would allow for payers and providers to leverage their data and business systems by tying together clinical, operational and financial data in a single, extended data repository.
"It is designed to be a real time system," said Dave Bennett, senior vice president of integration with NantWorks. "Now you can create the right workflows for care coordination, population health and the dashboard specific to that. In addition, what the platform does is take a supply chain model and implements it in healthcare."
One important feature Bennett noted that can significantly help organizations is the company's predictive modeling capabilities, which will allow it to be fed data on a specific patient population and predict the levels of care needed for that population.
Ultimately, both NantHealth and Blue Shield of California want to create an enabling technology that will provide clinicians with a complete view of the patient's current health. To do this, it will pull in disparate data that may include prescription medications (and whether the patient actually filled the prescription), records of emergency room visits or appointments with other specialists and providers, current information from the provider's EHR and claims data from the payer, among others.
Having this information at the clinicians finger tips, as well as the most recent medical research on treatments curated from peer-reviewed medical journals is all aimed at improving the health of patient populations and individual patients.
"Our first responsibility should always be to the health of our patients. If we can keep them out of the hospital and feeling good, I see that as a job well done," said Lou Lazatin, president and CEO of Saint John's Health Center. "This new program will help bridge the gaps in care so we can do just that."
While Jones admits they won't get to this ultimate model right away, the hope is that the ACO partners will also provide ideas for how to develop the CLC over time as it looks to improve the performance of these partnerships.
Costs to run the cloud-based system will be borne by both Blue Shield and the providers, though Jones said the payer is still working out the details of exactly how those costs will be shared.