Healthcare consulting firm Optum on Tuesday launched The Optum Institute for Sustainable Health, a research and applied policy group with the goal of increasing coordination of care, improving transparency and encouraging patient engagement.
"Our focus at The Optum Institute is to help develop and foster sustainable health communities," said Carol Simon, The Optum Institute's director. "This is an extension of current movements like ACOs and medical homes, but the sustainable health community is broader than an ACO. It not only engages providers, it focuses on patients, payers and employers."
According to Simon, there is a growing recognition in the healthcare industry that there is a need for more and better data to gauge what is and isn't working.
In its first research study, The Optum Institute published "Sustainable Health Communities – A Manifesto for Improvement," a national opinion survey conducted on its behalf by Harris Interactive on quality of care, accountable care and what it will take to move to high-performing local healthcare communities.
Key challenges identified in the study include:
1. The Health Challenge: U.S. adults believe that patients always or often receive needed preventive healthcare only a third (33 percent) of the time, and doctors think this is true only half (50 percent) of the time.
2. The Quality Challenge: Nearly two thirds of physicians (64 percent) say that there are "significant differences in the quality of care provided by doctors" in their local area.
3. The Cost Challenge: U.S. adults believe that healthcare costs in their community could be cut by between a quarter and a third (29 percent) – without having a negative impact on quality. Looking to the future, only a quarter of physicians (26 percent), around a third of U.S. adults (38 percent) and half of hospitals (50 percent) believe that – absent new action – their local health community is on course to becoming more sustainable.
"The immediate goal for the Optum Institute is to work on pulling out the messages in the Harris poll and drill down to specific communities to see what is working and where," said Simon.
"We are doing some market scanning to track development of ACOs. We are also finalizing an advisory board and are going to use that as a vehicle for convening high-level forums and start a conversation," added Simon. "What's missing from the debate is the sense of how do you move a community from point A to point B. We hope to tap the 'boots on the ground' experience and get responses from folks who are leaders in the community to see the practical lessons that come forward."
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The Optum Institute will also be committed to increasing care coordination, transparency of information regarding cost and quality of care and patient engagement, said Simon.
"There's a recognition on the part of providers regarding opportunities to increase care coordination and improve transparency," said Simon. "Let's look at communities that have good care and see how to feed back information to other providers so they can pull themselves above the bar. There are real opportunities for making good on that."