NCI Adds Lightbeam Population Health to HIT Infrastructure

January 18, 2017 - The North Country Initiative (NCI) healthcare partnership has added Lightbeam Health Solutions to its health IT infrastructure to provide the Lightbeam population health platform to 150 physicians in 30 practices over six hospitals and several independent practices.

The health IT company will allow NCI’s physicians to access aggregated clinical and claims data at the point-of-care to reduce costs and provide better patient care.

Lightbeam offers modules organizations can choose based on their needs for security, data storage, and analytics. NCI chose to deploy all of Lightbeam’s population health modules including:

• Enterprise data warehouse: a single-integrated patient registry that extracts data from multiple sources and aggregates it into an enterprise data warehouse.
• Searchlight risk stratification: focuses care coordination resources on the right patients at the right time.
• Evidence-based care management: predictive modeling engine that feeds the Care Management solution, identifying gaps in care and opportunities for interventions.
• Comprehensive analytics: measure real-time performance, cost, risk and productivity against strategy and goals to prevent unnecessary spending.
• Patient and physician engagement solutions: providing bi-directional communication directly with the patient including care plan content, medication reminders, and preventive visit recalls. Physician engagement helps physicians make informed decisions and ensure patients are receiving comprehensive care.
• Quality optimizing and reporting functions: simplifies the reporting experience, and enhances physician quality reporting system participation efforts.

NCI struggled to meet mandates required under the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program and its Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). The two programs require specific technology especially its smaller locations with weaker health IT infrastructures.

“We evaluated many population health vendors and found a vast disparity between what vendors say they can do and what they can actually do, especially when it comes to DSRIP-related requirements. Lightbeam’s proven results with dozens of MSSP ACO customers not only impressed us, but it gave us great confidence in partnering with Lightbeam,” said Corey Ziegler, Regional CIO and Director of the North Country Health Information Partnership.

“We also value Lightbeam’s SaaS-delivery model because it removes burden from our IT staff,” he continued. “We are committed to getting every ounce of value from our Lightbeam partnership as we roll out key services to improve the health of the communities we serve.”

NCI was determined to implement a better population health management platform into their health IT infrastructure because of the future transition to value-based care programs and the organization’s own goals for accountable care.

“North Country Initiative and our partners know the future of healthcare is in value-based care programs and undoubtedly, that transition comes with challenges and unknowns. NCI continues to make the necessary investments to assist our partners in meeting the goals of value-based programs,” said Brian Marcolini, Director of North Country Initiative and CEO of Healthcare Partners of the North Country.

“Lightbeam, with their demonstrated success in this new payment landscape, will be the perfect partner to help our region outperform and assist NCI in meeting value-based program deliverables,” he added.

NCI has used Lightbeam Population Management Platform to ensure health data risk is minimal, but has also used the platform to further assist their patients.

“North Country Initiative has shown great resourcefulness by taking the steps necessary to not only mitigate risk and maximize performance within programs like DSRIP and MSSP ACO, but more important, they’re investing in solutions to improve the health and lives of the communities they serve,” said Pat Cline, CEO of Lightbeam. “Lightbeam is fully committed to helping North Country Initiative experience the kinds of superior results we have achieved, most notably helping our ACO clients generate more than twice the savings of non-Lightbeam clients in 2015 alone.”