The shift to value-based care arrangements are a hands-on affair for physician practices as they take on a new approach to managing, tracking and reporting their practices and patient outcomes.
Smart investments in technology can be a significant aid to this process, the American Medical Association reported Nov. 10. Technology can not only help streamline and enhance practice performance outcomes, but it can also help practices identify opportunities for leveraging new financial incentives that can be used to improve individual and community health.
The AMA has created a resource guide for physician practices looking to vet and implement new technologies to support their shift to value-based care arrangements. The guide also includes information that can assist in negotiating vendor agreements.
Here are four takeaways from the AMA’s resource guide:
1. Identifying gaps and essential considerations. Physician practices must begin by asking questions about what gaps in management they are trying to cover. This could be improving documentation, enhancing data analytics, implementing new care intervention, reporting performance data or integrating into other systems used by clinical partners. It is also important to discern whether a complete overhaul of a technology suite or an add-on is a better fit for achieving the practice’s goals.
Before exploring the wide variety of options available to physician practices, management teams must first decide whether a technology will fit seamlessly with any existing or remaining technology infrastructure, how it aligns with data security and regulatory risks, and whether it can be implemented in a way that does not disrupt workflow or increase burnout risk.
2. Negotiating vendor agreements. There is a plethora of technology vendors available to physician practices, which can take an initial step towards learning more about prospective partnerships by issuing a request for information or a request for proposal from vendors. This is a preliminary step in procurement that allows practices to obtain “high-level” information that can help “whittle down the pool of prospective voices,” according to the AMA.
Practices should also carefully review the structure of any agreements or affiliations, as each type of vendor contract can vary in complexity depending on the nature of the relationship and the products involved. This may include service agreements, software agreements, hardware agreements, cloud agreements and data-related agreements, to name a few.
3. Collection and use of data. Before signing onto an agreement with any technology vendors, practices must first understand a vendor’s “physical, administrative and technical safeguards” to protect patients’ sensitive information, according to the AMA. Practices should specifically consider whether the vendor has HIPAA-related policies and procedures, a privacy officer, or past security incidents, as well as how those incidents may have been handled.
4. Compliance considerations. Professional liability is a top concern when evaluating new technologies for implementation in any medical practice, and organizations must ensure that they are abiding by applicable state and federal laws and regulations.
“At a high level, the federal Anti-Kickback Statute, Physician Self-Referral Law (Stark law) and False Claims Act each regulate certain kinds of physician investments,” reads the AMA resource guide. These laws are primarily enforced by the HHS Office of Inspector General, who has raised concerns that physician ownership in entities to which they may refer can implicate the AKS. Physicians should become familiar with the guidelines set forth by these laws to understand whether these investments may cross legal lines, such as making bon a fide capital investments, receiving returns out of proportion to their investments, or receiving investment opportunities based on their actual or potential business generated for the entity.
