Purdue, FSSA partner to bring new care models, process improvements, and technology systems to four Indiana communities to improve opioids addiction treatment and hospital transitions from long-term care

Tuesday, November 27 2018 - West Lafayette,

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The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) and the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University today announced a two-year, $12M contract to continue to provide direct, technical assistance to the state’s Medicaid providers. By promoting and enabling optimal use of modern health information technology, the funding will help address several clinical challenges currently impacting long-term care and the opioid crisis like patient bottlenecks, overprescribing, and unnecessary emergency room visits.

Funding comes through the FSSA from a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) 90/10 matching grant for which Purdue matches the 10 percent. For the past several years, the applied arm of the Regenstrief Center, Purdue Healthcare Advisors, and the FSSA have worked together to provide quality reporting and health IT security services to approximately 150 ambulatory organizations (and hundreds of providers) through the Indiana Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Programs, formerly the Indiana Medicaid Meaningful Use Incentive Program. This assistance, which helps providers properly utilize their electronic health records systems (EHR) and complete security risk assessments to comply with federal requirements aimed at improving care, will continue until 2020.

The new FSSA contract asks Purdue to address two additional areas of concern for the Indiana Office of Medicaid Policy and Planning that contribute to sub-optimal patient care as well as higher costs.

“For the past several years, the FSSA and Purdue have worked to create a technological foundation that makes it possible for us to offer this next level of assistance,” said FSSA Secretary Dr. Jennifer Walthall, MD, MPH. “By helping providers implement and optimize their EHRs, we have set the stage for data interoperability that will make it easier for communities to address today’s critical healthcare issues and improve care for Medicaid patients. Long-term care and opioid addiction treatment are two areas where we see a tremendous potential for improvement with technology and predictive analytics.”

The contract extends funding to allow Purdue to work closely with four, high-need Indiana communities. Two communities will participate in work aimed at improving the quality and cost of care for Indiana Medicaid long-term care (LTC) patients through better care transitions and medication management.  LTC encompasses a variety of services that help meet both the medical and non-medical needs of people with a chronic illness or disability. Two additional communities will participate in work focused on community coordination of opioid addiction treatment and referral. Recruitment for community participants is currently underway.

The grant funding allows Purdue to design and implement new care models, process improvements, and technology systems that advance EHR interoperability, patient education, medication management, care transitions, clinical decision support, and population health. “Purdue will use HIPAA-secured information technology, system analysis design, predictive analytics, and grass-roots, community-building techniques to enhance collaboration within these communities so the right hand knows what the left is doing,” said Regenstrief Center Director and St. Vincent Health Chair of Healthcare Engineering Paul Griffin, Ph.D. “A community that understands the big picture, has the ability to see moving parts in real-time, and can predict pitfalls will be more successful in tackling problems that prevent effective patient care.”

Selected communities will work with PHA to form a “small-care neighborhood” comprised of stakeholders such as Medicaid clinics, specialty clinics, EMS, hospitals, pharmacies, payers, courts, and others who provide needed healthcare and social services. PHA will contract with vendors to create HIPAA-compliant architecture that equips each small-care neighborhood with real-time integration of clinical and operational data. Purdue’s Agile Strategy Lab will energize the neighborhoods with a collaboration methodology called “Strategic Doing” that helps to form collaborations, drive local and innovative solutions with broad community ownership, and move toward measurable outcomes.

Efforts to impact the cost and quality of care for Medicaid LTC patients will focus on improving EHR utilization around the managing of medication that occurs during hospital-to-LTC transitions. Predictive analytics combined with best practices identified by Purdue pharmacy experts will help providers make better decisions on medication reconciliation and integrated care planning, and identify patients with high risk of avoidable ED visits, inpatient stays, or other unnecessary high-cost situations.

Efforts surrounding opioid addiction treatment and referral coordination will focus on reducing opioid prescribing, increasing usage of the State INPSECT drug prescription monitoring system, and increasing referrals and treatment to addiction services. PHA will work with communities to integrate EHRs with INSPECT, and to incorporate INSPECT usage within day-to-day workflows. Purdue will help to establish a regional, referral-management process with a real-time dashboard to guide demand-capacity management, care navigation, and care access. Predictive analytics will identify Medicaid patients with high risk of opioid-related overdose, non-compliance, relapse, or new addiction.

 

About the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration

The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) is a health and social services funding agency. Ninety-four percent (94%) of the agency's total budget is paid to thousands of service providers ranging from major medical centers to a physical therapist working with a child or adult with a developmental disability. The six care divisions in FSSA administer services to over 1.5 million Hoosiers.

About Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering

The Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering located in Discovery Park at Purdue University serves as a national nucleus for driving high-impact improvement in healthcare delivery by mobilizing the intellectual strengths of Purdue faculty and partners. Its applied arm Purdue Healthcare Advisors (PHA) is a not-for-profit outreach initiative created in 2005 to serve the training, project facilitation, and assessment needs of thousands of independent practices as well as hundreds of hospitals/healthcare systems striving to increase cost savings as they better the patient-care environment.

 

Media Contacts:

Jeanine Parsch, Managing Advisor-Communications & Marketing, Purdue Healthcare Advisors; (765) 447-7047; jeanine@purdue.edu

Jim Gavin, Director of Communications and Media, FSSA; (317) 234-0197; jim.gavin@fssa.in.gov

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Tags: Health IT Security , Process & Cost Improvement (LEAN) , Quality Services