Quality and Stewardship in Healthcare
Public payers, and increasingly private payers, are linking healthcare reimbursement to the achievement of quality outcomes, with ever more complex incentive and penalty programs. Drawing from his success in containing costs and maximizing performance using innovative care collaborations, including consults, Dr. Kevin Ronan will discuss how eConsults can improve care quality and stewardship in healthcare.
Quality and Stewardship in Healthcare
Kevin Ronan, MD
Pediatrician and Senior Manager of Compliance/Risk Management, Vista Community Clinic
How eConsults aid FQHC and healthcare reimbursement
A conversation with Dr. Kevin Ronan, Pediatrician and Senior Manager of Quality Assurance at Vista Community Clinic. Learn more about how eConsults have provided valuable support for VCC in maintaining NCQA guidelines and aiding FQHC and PCMH mode of care reimbursement.
Q: Can you provide an overview of your role as Senior Manager of Quality Assurance at Vista Community Clinic (VCC) and how you have become involved with AristaMD?
As the Senior Manager of Quality Assurance at VCC, I am responsible for NCQA’s Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) program.
One of their most important and highly scrutinized measures is how health systems use data in quality improvement and assessment. Our intention is to be good stewards of our resources and to identify which resources help us to achieve quality measures (taking care of diabetes etc.) in a financially responsible way. We have realized, after seeing the referral and eConsult data from AristaMD, is that leveraging the AristaMD telehealth platform helped us to bend the cost curve of healthcare reimbursement through significant avoidance of in-person specialty referrals.
Doctors tend to be pretty conservative and some find it hard to embrace change, even when clearly helpful. However, once clinicians started utilizing the platform to gain access to timely specialty care, it became hard to think of life without it.