OREANDA-NEWS.   GE Healthcare today announced new offerings from its USD 2B software investment targeting the rapidly emerging market for integrated care solutions. These new offerings combine software, services and a broad ecosystem of partners to help healthcare delivery organizations reduce both clinical and financial risk, while positively impacting the quality of care. Additionally today, GE Healthcare announced an expanded approach to population health by leveraging its relationship with Caradigm, a population health company formed by GE Healthcare and Microsoft in 2012.

It is estimated that a majority of health plans will have more than half of their business supported by value-based payment models in the next five years[1], and that nearly 40 percent of providers believe that in three years the majority of their income will come from value- based payments[2].

“In moving from a volume-based to a value-based healthcare landscape, providers need to deploy the right tools and capabilities to make this transition both streamlined and profitable, while delivering highly effective care to patients,” said Jan De Witte, president and CEO, GE Healthcare IT. “With our new solutions announced today, providers can leverage comprehensive data in the patient record to get a more informed perspective on patient care.”

GE Healthcare’s Integrated Care Solutions are tailored to address the changing needs of providers and health systems engaged in risk-sharing payment models and are built around two key pillars:

- Financial Management – Solutions to help healthcare organizations with comprehensive financial needs, including revenue cycle management and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), address emerging healthcare reform models.

- Population Health Management – Solutions for proactively managing and caring for defined patient groups through data aggregation, risk stratification, care coordination and patient outreach.

While Financial Management Solutions are delivered exclusively by GE Healthcare, GE and Caradigm are working together to jointly deliver a robust set of population health management solutions that address the needs of both small ambulatory providers and large integrated delivery networks.

New Financial Management Solutions

GE extends its leadership position in the financial management solutions space with two new product offerings:

- Centricity Financial Risk Manager addresses the needs of providers taking on full or partial capitation risk. With exceptionally designed, provider-centric workflows, Centricity Financial Risk Manager helps providers administer risk-based claims, monitor utilization and reimbursements, and handle increasingly complex contract terms. Designed from the ground up, users can customize workflows and scale patient populations from thousands to millions of lives.

- Centricity Business 5.2 is the latest update to GE’s industry-leading enterprise-wide revenue cycle management solution. New functionality added to Centricity Business will help providers develop and operationalize episodic bundled care programs, adding to Centricity Business’ exceptional ability to support a variety of value-based payment models. Centricity Business integrates billing activities across the acute care and ambulatory settings, along with comprehensive task management that has already helped organizations reduce their cost to collect to less than 4%[3].

“Centricity Financial Risk Manager has helped us manage over 575,000 patient lives in multiple risk-based contracts,” said Julie Castongia, Director of GE Systems for HealthCare Partners, an early adopter of Financial Risk Manager. “We are confident that it will be able to help manage our increasingly complex contract administration needs as we enter into other new and creative arrangements over the next several years.”

Population Health Management Partnership

GE Healthcare and Caradigm will extend Caradigm’s population health solutions into GE Healthcare’s install base of ambulatory providers. Caradigm offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to enable health systems and Integrated Delivery Networks (IDN) to improve population health. The portfolio, which comprises data aggregation and control, healthcare analytics, care management and coordination, and wellness and patient engagement, addresses the needs of ambulatory practices and single hospitals as they shift to accountable care and take on risk for patient populations.

“With the significant increase in physician groups moving to accountable care, the need for population health solutions has never been greater,” said Michael Simpson, President and CEO, Caradigm. “We look forward to working with GE Healthcare to extend our portfolio to this market.”