LTPAC information technology conference melds care quality & business impact

I thought I would use this month’s blog to update you on the 9^th Annual LTPAC HIT Summit that will be held on June 16-18, 2013 at the Baltimore Inner Harbor Hyatt Hotel. This year’s summit will be one of the most important as LTPAC providers are being recognized by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as necessary partners in the successful implementation of the HITECH Act. I also believe that the LTPAC providers along with the LTPAC IT companies recognize that a more robust facility and agency EMR and transitions of care software are important to the patients under our care.

This year’s Summit puts the total new healthcare system in perspective and the role of LTPAC. I thought I would go through a number of the major presentations and encourage you to go to the LTPAC HIT Collaborative website and register to attend. The formal meeting is on Monday and Tuesday but there is a tentative plan to hold a half-day session on Sunday to discuss HIT Standards.

Keynote Speaker– Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, Director, Office of Standard and Interoperability and the Acting Chief Scientist in the ONC. Prior to ONC he was on the teaching staff in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University and had a clinical practice at Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. Dr. Fridsma is also coordinates the Standards and Interoperability (S&I) Framework Workgroups. The LTPAC Longitudinal Coordination of Care  (LCC) is one of the S&I Framework initiatives and is made up of members of the LTPAC community. The key to the LCC is that it is one of the few workgroups that are looking at longitudinal care.

Monday June 17 Agenda includes the following major topics:

Care Coordination and Payment Models – Successful transformation of the acute, post-acute, and long-term care delivery and payment systems requires new and improved models care coordination and integration. This session will describe some of the models being tested by CMS and the critical factors needed for care coordination including risk sharing, governance, and the use of health IT to support information exchange and critical analytics.  The session will include information from the perspective of LTPAC providers regarding their involvement and experiences in these new models. The session will discuss the LTPAC industry’s readiness, and benefits and risks for participating in these emerging models.

E-Decision-Making – Clinical Decision Support, Apps, and Analytics – This session highlights the current state of technology, identifies what is currently being done to include CDS including what is being advanced with CMMI Innovation Grant (e.g. Interact, Interact 2, On-Time QMs, etc.), discusses the gaps in comparing LTPAC to EPs/EHs, and what is coming in the future.

Use of Enabling Technologies – Even the most advanced EMR is not the end-all-be-all. To improve quality of care, LTPAC organizations need to expand their vision to include telehealth, remote monitoring, medication management and safety technologies to support innovative care delivery and payment models.  This session explores an arsenal of these enabling technologies and how they engage patients and care providers, discusses their role in care delivery, care coordination, their interplay with EHR systems, and discusses research and future tools.

Person Centric Longitudinal and Transition e-Quality Measures – As we move into person-centric longitudinal care, the need for harmonized e-Quality Measures is ever apparent. LTPAC organizations are faced with the need to collect an increasing number of e-quality measures for an increasing number of different groups. This session identifies the emerging challenge that providers will face accommodating different measures and explores the latest e-measures from NQF’s Measure Application Partnership (MAP) report, CMS harmonization of QMs and discusses the types of quality measures that are emerging for ACO-type arrangements that impact LTPAC.

LTPAC Technology Survey – The Chief Information Officer Consortium (CIOC) group which is made up of almost 50 LTPAC CIOs have done a 2013 survey of LTPAC Technology. The results of the survey will be presented along with an evaluation of HIT capability. 

Tuesday June 18 – The second day agenda is made up of a few major presentations plus breakout sessions

Town Hall:  Longitudinal Coordination of Care- Increasingly, the healthcare delivery system is being transformed to support coordination of care across settings and providers.  This session explores:

• Longitudinal coordination of care, including transitions of care and shared care planning, as well as the tools needed to support these efforts.
• Work underway through the S&I LCC workgroup and its’ collaborators related to transitions of care and care planning, and the relevance of this work to the MU program and LTPAC providers.
• How the electronic exchange of TOC and care plan documents can be accelerated in LTPAC

Hospital Readmissions– Success Stories and Use of Technology – Quality patient care involves avoiding unnecessary hospitalization.  Using technology, hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies are working together to reduce hospital readmissions and improve care planning for their patients in successful and increasingly innovative ways.  This important initiative is one of the advancing, first steps toward longitudinal care.  Come join this session to hear about current case studies and success stories for reducing hospital readmissions through LTPAC-Hospital partnerships.  You will gain valuable insight into what’s working with information technology and discover ways that you can enhance collaboration and improve outcomes. 

Tuesday June 18 Breakout Sessions include the following topics, among others:

• Connecting LTPAC to the Healthcare System of the Future
• Implementing Health Information Technology for Post Acute Care: A CMS Special Innovation Project
• No LTPAC, NO ACO!
• Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring Initiative
• Interact: Reducing Rehospitalizations – Interact and Tools
• Staying Connected While Aging in a Digital Era 
• Developments in HCBS: CARE, Quality, and HIT
• LTPAC and the HIPAA HITECH Omnibus Rule
• LTPAC Informatics: Workforce Acceleration and Organizational Readiness
• Opportunities with Blue Button and other tools

Exhibits and Interoperable Showcase – Visit the exhibit hall and the Interoperability showcase of providers that have moved forward in interoperability.

Go to the LTPAC HIT Collaborative Website to Register www.ltpachealthit.org. The cost covers the cost of food and presentation space. The Collaborative is an informal group of the associations that make up LTPAC providers and vendors.

On another issue, I will be giving a Webinar with the CEO of MDIAchieve for Long Term Living on ACOs and HIT: The Impact of Technology on LTPAC Participation in ACOs on May 23. Join us to learn more!

John Derr

John Derr, RPh, currently serves as Health Information Technology Strategy consultant to Golden Living, where he previously served as CIO and CTO. He is currently on the HHS Federal Advisory Committee on Standards, a CCHIT Trustee, and serves on several other federal and state HIT advisory groups. His extensive career has included major executive positions with Squibb, Siemens, Tenet (NME) and AHCA/NCAL. With almost 50 years of experience in healthcare, Derr has also started four companies.