Health System Analytics that Drive Value

How the largest health systems and care providers can move from risk to optimization in an expanding value-based care environment. — From Curia.ai and Foundry.ai.

CONTENT

• Introduction: The Future is Now
• The Most Leveraged Analytics Capability is Optimization
• Optimization Requires Understanding Both Risk and ‘Impactability’
• Building an Optimization Capability

INTRODUCTION: THE FUTURE IS NOW

The healthcare world of the future — value-based care, population health, artificial intelligence, and so on — is no longer on the horizon; it is here now.

In 2019, the HealthCare Executive Group, composed of senior executives across leading providers, payers and technology companies ranked the key issues on which they are most focused.¹ The top 4 items? Data analytics, total consumer health, population health services, and value-based payments.

As it is often put, the sector is shifting from volume to value.

For the foreseeable future, most large health systems will face a complicated set of payment arrangements, including both traditional fee-for-service (FFS) and value-based care (VBC) arrangements such as commercial pay-for-performance (P4P) contracts, Medicare Shared Savings Program, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), Hospital Value-Based Purchasing, Medicare Advantage, managed Medicaid plans and direct-to-employer bundles.

This complexity can make the transition to VBC feel choppy and uneven, but nonetheless the market shift has been profound. According to the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network, the percentage of total healthcare payments tied to a value-based payment methodology reached 36 percent of total dollars paid to providers in 2019,² up from 23 percent in 2015. And this transition is unlikely to be reversed for a simple reason: value-based care can produce better care at a lower cost. A landmark 2019 analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine compared more than 850,000 members enrolled in a typical VBC insurance arrangement to 1 million matched control fee-for-service members over an eight-year period, and found both better management of chronic illness and annual cost savings that increased over time to 12% by the end of the study period.³

THE MOST LEVERAGED ANALYTICS CAPABILITY IS OPTIMIZATION

Managing in this new environment requires new skills and capabilities.

Traditional providers sometimes observe that, despite its rise in popularity, “pure” VBC arrangements still only produce a small fraction of revenue. But this perspective obscures two important points:

1. The vastly disproportionate profit leverage VBC plans can provide because they can generate incremental free cash flow in a business that has very low operating margins. Consider the simple math that a health system with a 5 percent operating margin and 2 percent of revenue at risk from VBC payments therefore has upside or downside revenue potential equal to 40 percent of system EBITDA. A 2019 McKinsey analysis of more than 4,000 health systems observed that “In many cases, the potential upside and downside from VBC payments could dwarf the entire system margin.”⁴
2. VBC-like payment elements increasingly impact the economics of traditional FFS services through early readmission penalties, bundled payments and the like.

Because of this combination of a very high fixed-cost base business and extremely high potential incremental margins from value-oriented arrangements, the most leveraged analytical opportunity is to find programs to drive patient and clinician behavior changes that improve care and trigger appropriate payments without adding (much) cost. The key capability required to achieve this is ‘optimization,’ which in this context is the capacity to predict the health and financial impacts of each of a set of feasible alternative actions with sufficient precision and reliability to allow decision-makers to allocate resources to their highest and best use.

• Such optimization opportunities abound in any large health system. A few illustrative examples include:
• ED attachment and retention programs to capture appropriate future utilization;
• Patient adherence communication to drive completion of course of treatment;
• Practitioner and patient communication to drive appropriate in-system referrals;
• Post-acute patient outreach to reduce inappropriate early readmission;
• No-show models plus targeted telephone outreach to increase appointment fill rates; and,
• Post-acute member outreach / home visits to reduce inappropriate early readmission.

In each case, targeting expensive communication, persuasion and enablement resources where they will create the greatest benefit offers tremendous potential for profit gain and superior patient care. But, in our experience, even sophisticated health systems are not capturing the vast majority of the value available from optimizing these kinds of programs.

Of course, none of these example ideas are new to health systems, nor is the idea of targeting them to patients where they will be most effective. So why are many opportunities like this under-exploited? Because even the sophisticated analytical systems deployed by most large health systems and their provider partners are missing a key ingredient necessary to target and improve such ideas with sufficient granularity.

OPTIMIZATION REQUIRES UNDERSTANDING BOTH RISK AND IMPACTABILITY

Over many decades, payers have developed advanced risk scoring models of various types. More recently, and mostly in response to their growing exposure to risk under VBC arrangements, many providers have built comparable risk stratification capabilities by partnering with payers, using third-party resources or creating their own in-house risk tools. They have naturally turned to these methods to help target various value-driving programs.

A practical example of such risk-based intervention targeting was executed by a large value-based care provider that had an ongoing outbound calling programs to encourage adherence for members who were in an unpleasant, extended infusion-based care program which served to forestall later much more serious and expensive medical problems. The provider built and deployed high-quality risk models to target these calls to the members who were most at risk of dropping out before completing the course of treatment. This risk-based targeting was fine as far as it went, and did improve program effectiveness materially.

But what this approach misses is a key dimension of the problem: the propensity of each patient to be impacted by the outbound contact (i.e., ‘impactability’).

For example, there are high risk patients who will not change behavior in response to even a well-timed and well-executed call.

The money spent calling them is entirely wasted. More perversely — but in our experience, always true for a non-trivial minority of patients for any given intervention — there may be patients who would have completed treatment, but drop out because we called them. In that case, we actually pay money to get a worse outcome. Typically, risk of non-adherence and impactability are very weakly correlated, and are in practice independent effects.

We can therefore represent the possibilities in the following matrix:

Ideally, we would only contact the ‘Persuadables,’ and prioritize within this group using our risk models. The most effective approach to do so is to:

1. Estimate for each patient the risk (or more formally, the expected value) of non-adherence if not contacted;
2. Estimate the probability of change in adherence if contacted for each patient;
3. Select the patients to call based upon maximum projected change in expected value of non-adherence caused by calling them.

BUILDING AN OPTIMIZATION CAPABILITY

Building an optimization capability demands two important extensions to the historical risk-centric approach.

• Predicting impactability requires causal analysis of prior attempts to implement comparable programs, e.g., “What was the actual incremental effect of those 5,000 adherence calls we did last quarter, and how did it vary by patient?” This is the foundation of all reliable impactability modeling. It requires different mathematical methods than risk modeling, many of which have only recently emerged from academic research⁵ in the past several years, and that have not been widely deployed in the healthcare sector.
• As the health system attempts variants of a program (for example, calls versus texts, message A vs message B, etc.), the inherent risk profile of each patient doesn’t change, but the impactability scores of a given patient to different program variants are different, often dramatically so. This implies the need to build many such sophisticated impactability models, which in turn implies a need for infrastructure to semi-automate model building at an advanced level that integrates analytical methods with a variety of internal and external data sources.

The economics of this are extremely attractive.

We have observed the empirical rule-of-thumb that program targeting using optimization methods that combine risk and impactability models will typically drive 2–4x larger gain in program economic efficiency than targeting using risk models alone.

A large health system can apply these methods to dozens to hundreds of management interventions per year. As a typical example of a single intervention, a leading value-based care provider executed a seasonal calling campaign to encourage heavy ED users to avoid inappropriate ED visits. As a first improvement, they then targeted these calls using an ED risk model, which increased the net profit per call from $7 to $11. They next further improved this targeting by combining a impactability model with this risk model, and drove the net profit per call to more than $20.

Applied across numerous programs, this approach can create tens of millions of dollars of measurable annual profit gain for a health system, as well as substantial improvements in quality of care.

SOURCES

1. HCEG, ‘2019 HCEG Top 10’, Healthcare Executive Group, https://hceg.org/hceg-top-ten/
2. HCPLAN, ‘APM Measurement: 2019 Methodology & Results Report’, Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network, http://hcp-lan.org/workproducts/apm-methodology-2019.pdf
3. Zirui Song, M.D., Ph.D., Yunan Ji, B.A., Dana G. Safran, Sc.D., and Michael E. Chernew, Ph.D., ‘Health Care Spending, Utilization, and Quality 8 Years into Global Payment’, The New England Journal of Medicine, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1813621
4. Kyle Gibler, MD, Ed Levine, MD, Joseph Mitchell, MD, Suzanne Rivera, and Jordan VanLare, MD, ‘How providers can best confront the reality of value-based care’, McKinsey & Company, https://healthcare.mckinsey.com/how-providers-can-best-confront-reality-value-based-care
5. Susan Athey & Guido Imbens, ‘Recursive partitioning for heterogeneous causal effects’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/113/27/7353.full.pdf

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Manzi — Partner, Foundry.ai

Jim is a Partner and co-founder of Foundry.ai. He was co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, which became the world’s largest cloud-based AI software company and the dominant platform for rapid, iterative randomized trials of business programs. Previously, Jim developed pattern recognition software at AT&T Laboratories, and worked as a corporate strategy consultant.

Jim is the author of several software patents for the automation of randomized experiments, as well as the 2014 Harvard Business Review article “The Discipline of Business Experimentation.” His 2012 book Uncontrolled on the development and application of randomized trials was widely reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other national publications.

Jim received an SB in mathematics from MIT, and was subsequently awarded a Dean’s Fellowship in statistics to the doctoral program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. ​ He serves on the Board of Directors of Aledade, an innovative value-based care company backed by Venrock and Google Ventures.

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