Alicia Voorhees, MPH, Director of Provider Network Strategy interviews with John P. Schmitt, MBA, PHD, EVP & Co-Founder of VBCExhibitHall on what Stellar Health brings to the value-based care space and how we set ourselves apart from others in the industry.

 

What does Stellar Health bring to the value based provider organization?

  • Stellar brings transparency and simplification of how providers can perform within a value-based care contract. Whether you are a sophisticated health system or an individual health practice, it can be pretty challenging to navigate complexity and different varieties of contracts out there. All of them look a little different, [especially when] you are working with 18 different payors. So what Stellar offers is a provider-centered solution that is payor agnostic – meaning that our providers can come to one platform, see all of their payors in one space. And it’s presented to them in a way that makes sense to a practitioner and not necessarily the way a health plan would think about it. So we are able to take data from the health plan, turn it into a simple checklist of actions that need to be completed for every single patient based on their unique care profile. So now if you’re a primary care practice, you are going in and looking at your open gaps that are available for each of your patients that need to be completed for the day, and your focusing on that less so than “Do I have enough patients in this program to work to be participating in it”, and trying to take the guesswork out of how you would perform in a value-based care contract. 

 

What does Stellar Health do apart from its competitors?

  • There are a lot of organizations that take data from health plans and turn them into really interesting analytics and insights. What we are able to do is actually unlock that data and make it into something that is actionable at the practice level and pair it with timely payments that are coming on a monthly basis to that practice. One of the biggest challenges that we see with value-based care is that we are asking providers and practices to pay attention to these value-based actions that typically don’t have reimbursement until 12-18 months after [they are completed]. So by the time that check is getting back to that practice, very often they don’t even know what it was for. So what we are able to do with monthly payments is actually tie reimbursement to the work that is being done, which helps incentivize a practice to pay attention to the work that needs to be done and the importance of following up from both the patients outcomes perspective as well as how they would perform in their contracts. The other thing that sets us apart is that of those monthly incentive dollars that we are pushing down to the practice for the work that’s completed, we encourage that practice to share with the staff. So completing these actions is really a team sport. It involves the clinician, it involves the extended care coordinator, the front desk staff, really anyone that is there is playing a part in closing all of these gaps. And by sharing some of those dollars with other members of the staff, we have seen tremendous performance from practices that are doing this, but really it goes a long way of recognizing that staff is doing to help complete these actions. And it’s important to them. And I think in today’s world of burnout and mass resignations from health care, this can go a very long way. Not only from a straight recognition perspective, but from a financial perspective, and also really contribute to job satisfaction and retention.