Blue Shield of California and health technology integrator NantHealth announced Tuesday they will co-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 Blue Shield's ACO partners to provide personalized, molecular-based medicine.
The CLC is set to launch as part of a new accountable care organization (ACO) that Blue Shield will form 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.
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 that it could offer current and future ACO partners.
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.
With this in mind, the company set out to create an enabling technology that seeks to 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 to other specialists and providers, current information from the provider's EHR and claims data from the payer, among others.
While Jones admits they won't get to this ultimate model right away, the hope is that their ACO partners will also provide ideas for how to improve the CLC over time as it looks to improve the performance of these partnerships.
"This is a transformative first step towards a new model, and that model being proactively sustaining health rather than reactively treating acute and chronic illnesses," said Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, founding chairman and CEO of NantHealth, in a press release. "Chronic illness has become epidemic, and that is the biggest problem facing our healthcare system, both in terms of health outcomes and costs. Rather than waiting until people fall ill and have to be hospitalized, the NantHealth approach is to monitor patients with chronic conditions, in their homes or wherever they may be, and intervene as necessary before they become seriously ill."
Blue Shield plans to roll out the CLC to St. John's Health Center and select other ACO partners for launch with the new plan year, Jan. 1, 2013. The intention is for the CLC to become standard technology offering for Blue Shield ACO partners moving forward.
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.