Value-Based Care
The Value-Based Care (VBC)category encompasses solutions that support healthcare organizations in transitioning to and succeeding within value-based care models. VBC Contracting and Enablementtools facilitate the negotiation and management of value-based agreements between providers, payers, and other stakeholders, ensuring alignment on performance metrics, payment models, and care standards. These solutions help organizations navigate the complexities of shared savings programs, bundled payments, and risk-sharing arrangements.
VBC Operationsfocuses on the day-to-day management of value-based care workflows, including care coordination, gap closure, and patient engagement. These tools streamline clinical and administrative processes to meet quality benchmarks and improve outcomes. VBC Data and Analyticsplatforms provide insights into population health trends, financial performance, and clinical outcomes, enabling healthcare organizations to make data-driven decisions and optimize care delivery. Together, these components empower organizations to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and achieve financial sustainability under value-based care models.
Product Usage: The product is used as an all-in-one system for phone communications, ticketing, order management, and customer automation processes, including follow-ups and reminders.
Strengths: The main strength of the product is its powerful automation capabilities and its flexibility, making it conducive for varied strategies in healthcare firms.
Weaknesses: Phone and ticketing functions are basic and are areas that could be improved.
Overall Judgment: The system has proved extremely useful for achieving product-market fit by acting as an all-in-one solution negating the need for multiple SaaS tools.
Product Usage: Inferscience is used as a sidecar within athenahealth to suggest diagnosis codes and highlight missed areas during patient visits, predominantly for new providers.
Strengths: Inferscience seamlessly integrates with athenahealth, offers effective clinical specificity, supports risk adjustment efforts and is cost-effective for small organizations.
Weaknesses: The tool wasn’t optimized for pre-visit or chart prep usage, took too long to load outside of the patient visit context, and sometimes produced irrelevant or illogical suggestions.
Overall Judgment: Inferscience’s integration with athenahealth and its usefulness for new providers were significant advantages, but limitations in its utility for chart preparation and occasional inaccuracies in its suspecting algorithm led to the eventual use of an internally developed solution.
Product Usage: Used as the primary platform for clinicians and coordinators, allowing for patient registration, scheduling, visits, and communication entirely through Tellescope, except for clinical note documentation, which is done on Elation.
Strengths: Tellescope has an advanced scheduling system that accommodates multiple providers across different states and the open API which permits quick and flexible amendments.
Weaknesses: The user interface could be enhanced on both ends (patient-facing and clinician-facing), with an additional need for better onboarding and user guidelines for new functionalities.
Overall Judgment: Despite minor shortcomings, the product’s unique positioning, continuous development, and responsive customer support make it an excellent choice for their needs.
Product Usage: The reviewer uses Accorded to demonstrate the Return on Investment (ROI) or Value on Investment (VOI) of their digital mental health services to employers and health plan partners.
Strengths: Accorded offers unique service-oriented actuary models which are flexible and cost-effective for evolving digital health companies.
Weaknesses: Accorded could improve in translating their work into marketable deliverables and expanding their analysis scope around value-based care.
Overall Judgment: Accorded has been an excellent partner, offering quality work equivalent to or better than more recognized brands at a competitive price.
Product Usage: The product is being employed as a CRM to manage, track, and organize interactions with patients, with additional features being custom triggers, automations, analytics capabilities, and a mobile app.
Strengths: Flexibility and customization to meet users’ needs, responsiveness and proactive adjustments are highlighted strengths.
Weaknesses: Initial experiences of bugs, although notable improvements have been seen. Additionally, the user interface could use some refinement.
Overall Judgment: The reviewer is satisfied, affirming that the choice to use Tellescope was the right decision for their organization, due to its adaptability, customization features, and quick implementation process.
Product Usage: The product is primarily used for acquiring commercial payer data to guide negotiations with insurance companies and for marketing to practices.
Strengths: The product’s key strengths include broad data coverage, a responsive team, and highly customizable and well-structured data.
Weaknesses: The product could improve on interpreting and enriching payer data, providing more understanding regarding provider affiliations, and enhancing the main UI to meet specific user needs.
Overall Judgment: The user expresses high satisfaction with the product, finding it to be an excellent choice for their specific data needs.
Product Usage: Welkin is primarily used for communication between nurses, facilitating referrals, telehealth sessions, and documentation.
Strengths: Welkin is praised for its flexibility and customizability that allows in-house feature development.
Weaknesses: Users are suggesting improvements in the assessment templates’ interactivity and the functionality of the calendar feature.
Overall Judgment: Despite its minor weaknesses, Welkin is greatly appreciated for its effective overall product and features.
Product Usage: Welkin is used primarily for communication between the clinical team and patients, with custom-built features and functionality present to facilitate seamless transitions.
Strengths: The platform’s strengths include its trackability for patients, customizability, robust API, and security permissions which provide a level of control for sensitive data.
Weaknesses: Welkin lacks a functionality to easily switch coverage for users when providers are unavailable and a feature that correctly links conversations to the involved parties’ account in the case of child-parent relationships.
Overall Judgment: Despite a few lacking functionalities, Welkin has been a good fit for the company due to its strengths and the company has appreciated the support and responsiveness to their requests.
Product Usage: Ribbon Health was used in an app for a large, self-insured employer to manage employee health, providing real-time, accurate information on provider types, medical services, availability, and insurance acceptance, thus improving provider search.
Strengths: The Ribbon Health team’s collaborative approach, the product’s modularity, accuracy of data, and the efficient implementation process were significant strengths.
Weaknesses: As the company grew, customer attention reduced, slowing down the response time to concerns, and the initial documentation was weak, but has since improved.
Overall Judgment: Despite some initial problems and growing pains, Ribbon Health was an overall good choice due to their attention to customer needs, accurate data provision, and strong, collaborative team. However, as they continue to grow, maintaining their standout qualities will be a challenge.
Product Usage: Tellescope is used as a main scheduling tool that offers the flexibility of implementing scheduling constraints, secure chat features, and potential addition of video conferencing and customized patient journeys.
Strengths: Tellescope offers a secure and HIPAA-compliant platform with flexibility, clear documentation, good support from co-founders, and fast customization of solutions based on specific client requirements.
Weaknesses: The product’s provider setting for availability is non-intuitive and the calendar integration is challenging for providers who want to link a non-HIPAA-compliant external calendar. Occasional minor bugs are encountered.
Overall Judgment: Despite minor bugs and the need for additional training for providers, the decision to choose Tellescope is validated by its cost-effectiveness, specific healthcare focus, strong support, and HIPAA compliance.
Product Usage: The Innovaccer platform is used by various team members to ensure continuous tracking and documenting of patient goals, actions, interventions, and barriers and to manage tasks effectively.
Strengths: The key strengths of Innovaccer include the timeline feature which allows the tracking of the long-term care journey, the ability to import data from other systems like PointClickCare, and the stability of the platform despite continuous expansion.
Weaknesses: The program falls short in the area of population health as it does not provide an overview, instead of requiring access to individual patient information.
Overall Judgment: While the introduction of Innovaccer to the team was overwhelming at first, due to the detail needed in documentation, overall the consensus is that it has streamlined many processes and decreased manual work.
Product Usage: Welkin is primarily used for clinical operations and to create complex care plans, as well as e-prescribing.
Strengths: Rapid adoption among clinicians and a high level of configurability are notable strengths of Welkin.
Weaknesses: The inflexible scheduling and messaging issues, oversold integrations, and lackluster onboarding process are notable weaknesses of Welkin.
Overall Judgment: While Welkin has been useful and reliable overall, there are areas for improvement and the reviewer mentions considering another EHR system that might have been a better match.
Product Usage: Lightbeam provides a central analytics management hub, tracking patient lives at-risk, financial benchmarks, and offering comprehensive care management.
Strengths: Lightbeam manages to simplify and organize complex health data into understandable blocks, providing clear visibility, and excellent audit support capabilities.
Weaknesses: Lightbeam suffers from real-time application limitations and slow data processing speeds, causing duplicate work and inefficiencies.
Overall Judgment: Despite its limitations, Lightbeam’s simplicity and payor integration make it a suitable choice for smaller practices with limited technological expertise.
Product Usage: Welkin is used as an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system by the company, with features serving as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. It is used for connecting with patients, clinical note-taking and review, workflow automation and tracking patient progress over time.
Strengths: The system offers a customizable interface and focuses on tracking long-term patient progress. It has integrated features like DocuSign and DrFirst, and allows data extraction and management for improving clinical operations.
Weaknesses: There are limitations on editing finalized notes, the calendar doesn’t show provider’s working hours or days off, and external care coordination is somewhat hampered due to a lack of support for fax. The APIs have certain limitations and the system doesn’t support bi-directional data flow with other platforms.
Overall Judgment: Welkin’s services have been largely positive, allowing effective patient management and providing a level of customization not common in typical EHRs. While there are certain limitations, the system is overall deemed reliable for the next couple of years, contingent on how it evolves and expands its features.
Product Usage: The user utilized Accorded as an actuarial consultant, providing them with nationwide multi-payer data points to assist in structuring value-based reimbursement contracts with insurance companies.
Strengths: Accorded was praised for offering good quality data, responsive service, and speed in offering analyses, all at an affordable price.
Weaknesses: The user wished Accorded demonstrated more innovative thought partnership and cautioned that users need to be quite prescriptive in their requests to get exactly what they need.
Overall Judgment: The user was very satisfied with the contract data Accorded provided and emphasized that the service offered great value for its cost. They recommended Accorded for organizations in similar circumstances.
Product Usage: Tellescope provides a comprehensive care management system suitable for highly interactive patient care with multimodal communication options like SMS, phone, and email.
Strengths: Tellescope quickly and effectively implements new features, offers strong capability in reporting, patient communication, team communication, forms and ticketing, and features a good API that integrates well with other systems.
Weaknesses: The user interface requires improvement and tends to lag in customizing for specific brand alignment. The platform could benefit from improvements in automations and batch processes, along with better rendering for content management.
Overall Judgment: Tellescope effectively fills a niche in the digital health care management market with a well-designed and user-friendly service that adapts well to changing user needs. The product offers latitude for growth, with robust functionality and customization options.
Product Usage: The product is primarily used for benchmarking; identifying the standard rates negotiated by their competitor set with various payers.
Strengths: The portal feature is viewed as the product’s strength, providing information on payer reimbursement for any service code.
Weaknesses: The product’s weakness is its timing; turnaround times often change and some tasks take longer than expected.
Overall Judgment: Despite the product being in its early stages and less sophisticated, the high level of customer service and reasonable pricing makes Serif an attractive option.
Product Usage: Ribbon is used to clean provider and location data for the company’s network directory, verify the accuracy of data sources, and provide additional metadata.
Strengths: The Ribbon product meets expectations in terms of data quality, is easy to use with a well-documented API, offers great support, and allows for customization without extra charges.
Weaknesses: The product has occasional reliability issues, does not provide hierarchical categorization for specialties, making it difficult to pull data at both levels, and the specialties endpoint could be improved.
Overall Judgment: The user is satisfied with Ribbon’s performance and plans to continue using it in the foreseeable future, largely due to the convenience and efficiency it provides. However, further improvements in data categorization and reliability could enhance user experience.