WellSky Integrates Analytic Tech With Sentara’s EHR

OVERLAND PARK, Kansas—WellSky, a health and community care technology company, announced the launch of WellSky CareInsights and WellSky Value-Based Insights at Sentara Home Care Services, the home health arm of Sentara Health, an integrated, nonprofit health care delivery system in Virginia and North Carolina.

This is the first time WellSky’s analytic technologies have been integrated with a health care system’s third-party electronic health record (EHR). With this approach, organizations using EHRs other than WellSky can adopt the WellSky Insights analytics solutions to improve utilization, optimize the use of virtual care and enhance patient outcomes while succeeding in value-based purchasing programs, the company said.

The introduction of the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) model by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services emphasizes home health agency performance within several quality measures, including hospitalization rates, clinical outcomes, and patient satisfaction. With a percentage of reimbursement tied to performance within the HHVBP model, and additional pressures with cost and staff shortages, home health providers need tools to align visit utilization and high-quality outcomes. Sentara looked to WellSky as a predictive analytics partner to help address HHVBP performance and achieve financially sustainable visit utilization.

“Our use of the WellSky Insights solutions has transformed our ability to anticipate the needs of individual patients and adapt our plans of care to better provide what that patient needs in that moment,” said Kim Bradley, vice president and chief nursing officer at Sentara Enterprises. “Shifts within the home-based care landscape are challenging care providers to make quick adjustments to improve clinical performance. Working with WellSky to integrate these advanced analytics solutions with our existing EHR has put us on a path to succeed in the HHVBP model.”

The integration enables WellSky Insights to consume specific data points from the EHR, process the data through WellSky’s proprietary models and return valuable clinical information about the patient population. The actionable insights surfaced by the solution allow Sentara providers to use information and data to make proactive clinical interventions.

Sentara has further used the predictive analytics within WellSky Insights to introduce hybrid visit models that provide flexibility in clinical resource utilization by balancing in-person visits with virtual visits, all while closely monitoring each patient’s hospitalization risk and hospice suitability. The insights provided through this integration with a third-party EHR open the door for hospital-owned home health providers to benefit from WellSky’s predictive analytics solutions and successfully participate in HHVBP.

“The clinical trends surfaced by WellSky Insights solutions create a new layer of intelligence on top of the EHR, which provide the clinical team tools that can help them make decisions about the patients they care for,” said Wes Little, chief analytics officer at WellSky. “We are thrilled to partner with Sentara to stand up this groundbreaking integration and are excited to bring these solutions to other organizations looking to succeed in HHVBP.”

To learn more about how WellSky Insights is benefitting home health agencies, visit wellsky.com.