CareCentrix and Turn-Key Health are integrating their respective care management and predictive analytic platforms to help identify seriously ill patients in need of community-based palliative care.
The companies are integrating the CareCentrix HomeBridge platform with Turn-Key’s Palliative Illness Management (PIM) application. The combined system will bring 200 million discharge records from the HomeBridge program into the PIM predictive analytics system to allow for speedier identification of patients in need of palliative care, focusing on those with advanced illness in the last 12 months of life.
The use of predictive analytics systems to identify patients in need of hospice or palliative care is an emerging health care technology trend. Such systems have shown promise in boosting performance on quality measures such as registered nurse and social worker visits during the patient’s last seven days of life, as well as allowing for earlier identification of individuals who need hospice.
Faster identification of these patients allows for earlier intervention to alleviate symptoms such as pain and stress.
According to the companies, the integrated system can help facilitate patients’ returning to their homes more quickly after discharge from an inpatient setting, allow for earlier transition to hospice when appropriate, as well as reduce hospital readmissions and the length of intensive care unit stays.
“By providing access to home-based palliative care, we are not only able to help improve the quality during end-of-life care, we can also assist health plans manage the associated costs,” said John Driscoll, CEO, CareCentrix.
Nearly 90 million people in the United States are afflicted with a serious or advanced illness, a number that many expect to double during the next 25 years, according to the Center to Advance Palliative Care.
The use of predictive analytics to identify which of these patients are candidates for community-based palliative care intervention can reduce hospital utilization and health care costs, a recent study found.
Among 804 Medicare Advantage plan members, those who had received community-based palliative care experienced a 20 percent reduction in total medical costs ($619 per enrolled member per month), 38 percent reduction in ICU admissions, 33 percent reduction in hospital admissions, and 12 percent reduction in hospital days.
“By establishing goals of care and a coordinated plan of care in advance of an acute event, the frequency and duration of acute care events are diminished,” said Christy Marks Davis, senior director of marketing for CareCentrix.
The collaboration positions the companies to help health plans identify patients in need of hospice care during the forthcoming demonstration of a hospice carve-in to Medicare Advantage.
“Medicare Advantage plans have traditionally been passive with respect to managing end-of-life cost and quality,” Marks Davis told Hospice News. “Adopting a systematic approach to end-of-life care improves quality and cost within populations suffering from a serious or advanced illness. Earlier conversations around goals of care and advance care plans creates a more natural transition to hospice, if that path is in concordance with a patient’s wishes.”
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