Further increasing its commitment to healthcare transparency, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana (Blue Cross) announced a multi-year partnership with Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®). Blue Cross will use BHI’s powerful analytics tools to give healthcare providers in the insurer’s network more actionable, accurate, and user-friendly cost and quality reports.
“Our members want more information about healthcare and our providers want more actionable data that they can use to drive care decisions,” said Dr. Thomas Diller, Blue Cross vice president of Population Health and Quality Transformation. “To continue being a market leader in sharing more data throughout our network, we are proud to partner with BHI and use their cutting-edge analytics tools to reinvent our provider reports, making them more useful to providers. This partnership represents our commitment to and investment in provider engagement. The reports will advance our work with provider partners around the state to drive meaningful changes that achieve higher-quality care and keep costs in line.”
Specifically, this partnership relies on BHI’s analytic capabilities to bundle care for thousands of conditions and complex treatments into clinically meaningful units of analysis and use our scalable clinical quality rules engine that measures quality improvement initiatives. Together, these capabilities comprise BHI’s Provider Index, a solution that enables stakeholders to assess the cost and quality of care delivered in different settings.
By replicating and/or augmenting nationally recognized quality measurements, Blue Cross can engage providers in predicting and better managing their performance on these ratings. In addition, the Plan will use BHI’s Provider Index to predict individuals with potential gaps in care. Blue Cross and its provider partners can then focus the right resources on closing these gaps while improving member engagement.
While BHI’s Provider Index generates benchmarked dashboards and standard reports, Blue Cross can work with its provider partners to create their own cost and quality metrics through the highly visual, intuitive interactive platform. The health plan is particularly interested in using BHI’s provider benchmarking and reporting solution to enhance its Specialty Care Insight program further. In that program, Blue Cross shares data insights with certain types of specialists and primary care providers who participate in the Plan’s value-based programs to help them identify effective strategies that reduce the use of low-value, high-cost services while assessing quality-of-care metrics.
“BHI always has built solutions that remove black boxes from healthcare analytics and open up data-driven dialogues between stakeholders,” said Swati Abbott, BHI’s CEO. “With consumers, employers, and government payers feeling unprecedented cost pressures and seeking value for every healthcare dollar, health plans are in a unique position to provide unbiased insights about variability in the quality and costs of care. We are thrilled to help Blue Cross harness the tools needed to accomplish these goals within its provider and member community.”
Blue Cross plans to begin delivering the new reports to healthcare providers before the end of this year. In addition to using this information to share more information with providers in the Specialty Care Insights program, Blue Cross can use this information to refine its value-based care arrangements and better understand the impacts that COVID-19 has had on healthcare costs and quality.
About Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is committed to our mission to improve the health and lives of Louisianians. Founded in New Orleans in 1934, we are a tax-paying nonprofit health insurer with offices in every major region to serve our customers. We were recognized in 2019 as an honoree of The Civic 50, named by Points of Light as one of the 50 most community-minded companies in the United States.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. We are a private mutual company, owned by our policyholders, with an independent Louisiana Board of Directors and no shareholders. We invite all Louisianians to visit our website at www.bcbsla.com or talk to us on social media.
About Blue Health Intelligence
Leveraging the power of medical and pharmacy claims data from more than 200 million Americans, Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) delivers insights that empower healthcare organizations to improve patient care, reduce costs, and optimize performance. With the largest, most up-to-date, and uniform data set in healthcare, BHI provides an accurate representation of the health profile of commercially insured Americans. Its team of data analysts, clinicians, IT experts, and epidemiologists provide analytics, software-as-a-service, and in-depth consulting to payers, providers, employers, medical device companies, and other healthcare stakeholders. BHI is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and carries the trade name of Health Intelligence Company, LLC. For more, visit bluehealthintelligence.com.