The Future is Now: Our work in 2016

The Starling Board of Directors and the leadership team have been working with providers and staff to respond to our current contractual incentives while preparing for our future. The attached plan outlines our work plan for the year. (Insert Gantt chart here) Our major points of focus are:

• Building prompts for quality measures into EHR, so needs can be addressed at the point of care
• Building prompts to address HCC coding, which communicates the true complexity of our patient population
• Use funds procured from health plans to employ staff to support patients as they transition from facility to home, with the objective of reducing readmissions
• Initiate integration of practices across branches, as appropriate, beginning with Oncology
• Establish plans to expand our primary care base, which is critical to value-based contracts
• Explore ways to redirect patients who are currently using the ED for non-emergency care, e.g.,
  • Relationships with urgent care centers
  • Telehealth
  • Practice-based staff to monitor patients at risk based on history or diagnosis

We are working on ways to support providers so that much of this documentation is completed by others in the practice – employing the ideal of having every person practice at the “top of their license”. Most Starling physicians are used to having support in the documentation of quality measures, and both branches have, historically, done well in many aspects of quality. Our objective is to protect physician and other provider time to enable them to do what they do best – one aspect of which is diagnostic coding to truly capture patient acuity. More on that topic next time.