The Client Challenge
As a large clinically integrated network (CIN) and accountable care organization (ACO), Southern New England Healthcare Organization (SoNE HEALTH) was looking to better engage with and deliver care to patients across numerous demographics and geographies. To that end, SoNE secured grant funding through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts (BCBSMA) to leverage digital technologies to improve health equity for targeted patient groups.
CHALLENGES TO DELIVERING MORE EQUITABLE CARE ACROSS A LARGE POPULATION:
- Overcoming barriers for patients who are sicker, experience more health inequities, and often face difficulties navigating the healthcare system.
- Engaging patients across a wide range of diversity (e.g., geography, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, varying ability, and language).
- Coordinating care across distributed provider organizations and a wide variety of technologies.
Navigating to Next: The Solution
SoNE partnered with Chartis to develop an enterprise digital strategy to promote health equity. The goal was to implement digital infrastructure to improve patient engagement through their care journey, enable access to care through alternative care modalities, and enhance quality through better data collection and reporting stratified by clinical, social, and geographic data points.
Chartis evaluated SoNE’s digital capabilities, integrations, and operational pain points, and assessed the challenges of delivering equitable care across the wide array of patient populations. Chartis then held several visioning and design-thinking workshops with key stakeholders to identify 3 areas of opportunity—all of which integrated health equity components into the digital infrastructure: (1) deploy a proactive patient engagement platform and improve the network referral system; (2) develop 24/7 virtual triage and care-at-home capabilities; and (3) optimize population health management through actionable data reporting.
For each opportunity area, Chartis collaborated with SoNE to determine the projects and digital investment required, and developed a digital transformation roadmap that included sequencing, best practices, risks, and dependencies.
