How Social Media Helped an Accountable Care Organization Save $50M

Coordination is key to the online retail industry. From the moment you click “order” on Amazon or Walmart.com, the retailer instantly starts packaging and mailing your item, providing you with each step the package takes until it reaches your doorstep.

The transparent and coordinated efforts taken by online retail companies have revolutionized the way we interact with everyday items. So, why haven’t we applied that same attention to our health?

“Amazon takes better care of our toothbrushes and toilet paper than we do human beings,” Christopher Crow, MD, recently said in a RevCycleIntelligence interview. “We’ve become numb to that even though we are dealing with the most precious things we have in our life, which is each other.”

Crow is the president of Catalyst Health Network, an accountable care organization of independent primary care physicians based in Dallas, Texas that has recently saved $50 million through its efforts to bring the same level of coordination to care delivery.

Care coordination is key to delivering high-quality care at the lowest possible cost. When providers across the continuum are able to seamlessly exchange data and communicate, they can deliver the most appropriate, high-value care to their patients all while helping patients navigate the notoriously complex healthcare system.

But care coordination is not always possible even when an organization is able to bring together hundreds of providers and office locations under one umbrella. Providers need interoperability to make care coordination possible, Crow explained.

Healthcare interoperability allows for the seamless exchange of data across providers. Yet, about half of acute care providers and a third of post-acute care providers have little ability to access or share patient data electronically. About a third of health systems also struggle with interoperability, a separate survey found.

“We've been talking about interoperability for 10 or 15 years, and it's gone almost nowhere,” Crow said. “The EMR companies are a massive block on that. They don't have an open API like the banking industry. It's just not going to happen any time soon.”

Without interoperability, the 650 primary care providers of Catalyst Health Network encountered significant barriers to care coordination, including an inability to efficiently and effectively coordinate referrals.

The patient referral process continues to be one of the healthcare industry’s most manual, outdated workflows. The leading statistic shows that around 75 percent of all medical communications are done via fax machine.

The paper-based referral process can leave patients and their providers in the dark. Not only do specialists have no way of knowing if they missed a patient referral, but primary care providers have little to no ability to know if their referrals ended in an appointment for much-needed care. In the end, patient care suffers.

With approximately 90 percent of Catalyst Health Network’s patients under some type of value-based contract, the organization could not risk patient outcomes deteriorating. So, Crow and his colleagues again turned to major web-based companies for inspiration.

“We went to Gmail, Facebook, and LinkedIn,” he explained. “We wanted to know if it was possible to communicate with each other on a platform that everyone uses.”

Similar healthcare-specific communication platforms do exist. However, the platforms are oftentimes run by a single payer or health system to specifically manage referrals for that line of business.

“If an insurance company asks somebody to do that, it was unique to them, or if a hospital system tried to do that, that was just unique to them,” Crow stated. “What we wanted to do was bring them something that can help for all of their patients.”

Catalyst Health Network decided to build on a new social media-inspired communication network of healthcare providers to drive care coordination, referral management, and general communication for patient care.

The organization partnered with LeadingReach, a health IT company focused on improving medical communications, to leverage a network of over 27,000 provider organizations. While not a social media platform, the HIPAA-compliant, free network has enabled 17 million care conversations across providers, which the organizations equate to over 60 years’ worth of gains in productivity.*

“Because of the communication and the tracking, they are taking better care of their patients,” Crow stressed. For example, using the network, Catalyst Health Network tracked between 200,000 to 250,000 referrals last year and provided reports to its providers on key metrics like how soon patients were able to see certain cardiologists or orthopedists.

“In addition to their patients, primary care physicians care about their time and their money but the other thing is they care about is their reputation,” he elaborated “They don't like to refer to people that make them look bad. This is just another tool to help them fine-tune at the service level, and in a place like North Texas where you have more than enough specialists, you can actually be picky. This is a tool that helps providers get better.”

And through better care, Catalyst Health Network has saved millions of dollars over the last three years, which has enabled its providers to successfully participate in new value-based payment arrangements that have been largely inaccessible to independent and small providers.

“We think it's an information highway and everybody needs to be on it,” Crow stated. “We don't own it; we just think that it's really important. The more people you get on it, the better the network effect.”

UPDATE 01/30/2020: Sentence updated to clarify the communications platform is not a social media platform and Catalyst Health Network did not build the platform.