NY Health Center Launches Population Health Management Partnership

New York-based federally qualified health center Morris Heights Health Center (MHHC) has launched a partnership with population health management technology company the Garage, under which the health center will use the company’s platform to improve care for its 50,000 patients in the Bronx community.

According to the press release, MHHC will use the Garage’s Software as a Service (SaaS) population health management platform, known as Bridge, to focus on improvements in care management. The platform is designed to connect providers and care teams to facilitate real-time patient information exchange, referral management, secure messaging, patient tracking and communication, clinical data management, clinical integration, clinical intelligence, and clinical analytics.

“We are excited to partner with the Garage,” said Mari Millet, president and CEO of MHHC, in the press release. “We needed a solution that would help us better serve our patients and prepare us for the opportunities ahead in value-based care. Their proven credentials along with the depth of their platform made this decision a no-brainer.”

The collaboration will also focus on what the Garage defines as the quintuple aim of healthcare: lower the cost of care, ensure better care for the patient, improve the health of communities, create a sustainable service model for care teams, and support equitable access to care for all.

MHHC’s implementation of Bridge will support the health center’s primary, specialty, dental, mental health, educational, and social services at 13 locations throughout the Bronx in New York City.

This partnership is one of multiple recent population health-related analytics initiatives undertaken by health systems to improve care.

In October, a new study showed that population health management and analytics enhanced care quality and efficiency in primary care practices enrolled in the now-defunct Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) program.

The study sought to evaluate whether population health management and analytics could help improve patient outcomes when combined with a value-based payment model such as the CPC+ program, which was designed to strengthen primary care via improved quality, access, and efficiency.

Overall, the study found that practices tend to have significantly better outcomes when a population health management tool and a VBP model are in place at the same time. Practices with both in place achieved a 24.1 percent reduction in admission rates and a 21 percent reduction in outpatient surgery. These primary care practices also experienced decreases in lengths of hospital stay and readmission rates by 32.7 percent and 30.4 percent, respectively.

In August, Baptist Health South Florida implemented Innovaccer’s Health Cloud platform to enhance population health analytics, provider engagement, and care management across its health system to create unified patient records and provide value-based care.