KLAS: Epic, Arcadia, Innovaccer Earn Top Marks for Value-Based Care

According to a new report from KLAS, payers and providers are looking to expand their value-based care contracts across business lines, and most are looking to do so with a fewer number of strategic vendor partnerships.

For the “Value-Based Care Reimbursement 2022” report, KLAS interviewed 54 healthcare executives, including CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMIOs, COOs, VPs, directors of population health, and VPs of analytics. Healthcare executives agreed that value-based care contracting will expand over the next three to five years, with the most significant growth in Medicaid and capitation arrangements.

Meanwhile, participation in commercial plans, Medicare Advantage, and Medicare Shared Savings Program, as well as bundled payments will remain high, executives said.

There is room to grow when it comes to value-based care reimbursement, the report indicated. While the sample of healthcare executives surveyed mostly hailed from more progressive organizations, about half receive one-fifth of less of their revenue from value-based reimbursement. Only those in accountable care organizations (ACOs) and clinically integrated networks said they receive over 90 percent of revenue from value-based reimbursement.

The healthcare executives overwhelmingly expect revenue from value-based care contracts to increase in the next three years as new opportunities for contracting emerge and market pressures from payers and the government propel them toward value-based care.

To achieve greater value-based care penetration, healthcare organizations are using strategic vendor partnerships.

KLAS found that the top vendors executives see as most able to assist with value-based care in the future include Epic, Arcadia, and Innovaceer, followed by Optum, Cedar Gate Technologies, Cerner, and Premier. The rankings were based on the number of mentions by surveyed healthcare executives. Other value-based care vendors mentioned in the report include Health Catalyst, Evolent Health, Lightbeam, and Lumeris.

What made certain vendors stand out? Healthcare executives said Epic’s Healthy Planet supports day-to-day workflows, especially since it is integrated with the main Epic medical record, and improvements made by Epic to Healthy Planet will be useful in the future for value-based care.

Additionally, executives using Arcadia pointed out that the vendor’s full suite of products, including robust data aggregation, reporting, and AI coding capabilities, are poised to help future value-based care efforts. They also emphasized Aracadia’s “ability to close quality gaps and view both clinical and financial data in one report.”

Finally, “impressive” dashboards and predictive analytics capabilities made Innovaccer stand out, while executives also highlighted the vendor’s willingness to create customized solutions to meet unique needs of customers.

Knowing who the top vendors are in the value-based care space may prove useful for provider organizations as they navigate additional value-based care contracts. KLAS found that provider organizations are looking to reduce the number of technology vendors or service firms they use to support value-based care.

According to the report, only 20 percent of executives said their organization uses more than two vendors to support value-based care efforts. Forty percent of executives, respectively, said they use one or two vendors.

The majority have consolidated the number of strategic vendor partnerships as part of “wanting a one-stop shop for data aggregation, analytics, and reporting,” KLAS stated in the report.

However, a counter-trend was observed among Epic Healthy Planet users. Healthcare executives on the Epic platform seem to be seeking other partnerships to implement additional value-based care capabilities, such as robust data aggregation from outside systems, stronger analytics, dashboards, and care management tools. Nearly all of the Epic respondents reported using another solution to complement their use of Healthy Planet.