Susan Mani, MD, vice president of Clinical Transformation and Ambulatory Quality at LifeBridge Health, discusses barriers to understanding the return on investment of social determinants of health initiatives.
Susan Mani, MD, vice president of Clinical Transformation and Ambulatory Quality at LifeBridge Health, discusses barriers to understanding the return on investment of social determinants of health initiatives.
Transcript
What are some barriers to understanding the return on investment of social determinants of health initiatives?
I think the biggest barrier that we had initially was really trying to figure out how to put dollar amounts to work that we did. Often times in health systems, we’re used to thinking of traditional service lines—cardiology, orthopedics, procedural based, visit based. So, very frequently, it’s easy to use that language. How do you think of it from a population health standpoint or from a care management standpoint? So, we really had to tweak the definition a little bit differently when it came to care coordination events, and once we created that language it became a lot easier to show a return on investment. How well were we actually touching our potential patients? Were our patients tiered?
We were thinking about high risk versus rising risk or low risk, because every patient is not going to need the same intensity of care. And the other thing we started to look at was the intensity of touch. For some of our patients, like our high-risk patients, they’re going to need a lot more intensity of touch, as I call them. For example, in a clinician’s office, you’re thinking about follow-up visits. Well, for our care coordination teams, it might mean those phone calls, it might mean how frequently are they keeping up with the care plan. All of those are actually touch points that you want to quantify. And then what are the referrals to services? Over time, if we have to start thinking about what community resources did we link our patients to, how are we getting them back into primary care successfully so they’re following up with their physicians. All of those are very important when you’re calculating your return on investment because that is the true RVU [relative value unit] in a population health standpoint.
Public Hospitals More Likely to Extend Unprofitable Services After 340B Participation, Study Finds
May 10th 2024Public hospitals were significantly more likely to sustain access to unprofitable services following 340B Drug Pricing Program participation, while nonprofit hospitals were mostly unaffected, according to a recent study.
Read More
CMS Medicare Final Rule: Advancing Benefits, Competition, and Consumer Protection
May 7th 2024On this episode of Managed Care Cast, we're talking with Karen Iapoce, senior director of government products and programs at ZeOmega, about the recent CMS final rule on Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage.
Listen
The Importance of Examining and Preventing Atrial Fibrillation
August 29th 2023At this year’s American Society for Preventive Cardiology Congress on CVD Prevention, Emelia J. Benjamin, MD, ScM, delivered the Honorary Fellow Award Lecture, “The Imperative to Focus on the Prevention of Atrial Fibrillation,” as the recipient of this year’s Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology award.
Listen
Posters Characterize DMD Caregiver Experiences, Impact of Gene Therapy on Caregiving Demands
May 10th 2024Posters presented at the ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research meeting explored Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) caregiver experiences and gene therapy’s impact on work opportunities for caregivers.
Read More
A Focus on Women: AUA Best Posters Highlight Female Athletes, Prenatal Care, and Women in Urology
May 9th 2024Three posters from the American Urological Association (AUA) 2024 Annual Meeting focused on urinary incontinence in female athletes, prenatal care for fetuses with spina bifida in California, and the experiences of women residents at the Brady Urological Institute.
Read More