A Scalable Solution for VBC Transformation

QURE Healthcare engaged in a partnership that offered cardiologists within a Northeastern health plan access to an innovative, evidence-based cardiology enhancement project: standardizing care through QURE’s simulated patient cases.

Early Impact: analyzing the health plan’s claims data and comparing practice patterns of the QURE participants versus those that didn’t participate has shown:

• 5% greater reduction in the rate of pharmacy spending for patients with cardiac disease from 2021 to 2023. Participating cardiologists showed a reduction of 7.9% vs 2.9% in non-participating cardiologists. This represents $3.2M less pharmacy spend.
• 4x greater relative increase in referrals to cardiac rehabilitation. Non-participating cardiologists increased 47%, while participating cardiologists increased 200%. This represents 414 additional patients in cardiac rehab and an estimated savings of $373,000

We conducted a prospective, quasi-controlled cohort study of hospitalists in eight hospitals matched with comparator hospitalists in six nonparticipating hospitals across the AdventHealth system. Diseases studied were Sepsis and Heart Failure. This study had a quasi-experimental control group which allowed us to isolate the magnitude of the QURE impact, which delivered length of stay reductions and $2.4 M in annual savings above and beyond improvements seen from other system-level initiatives. Journal Hospital Medicine, 2019

We created a series of gamified acute-care COPD case simulations with real-time feedback over 16 weeks then performed a year-over-year analytic comparison of the cost, length of stay (LOS), and revisits over the six months prior to the introduction of the simulated patients, the four months while caring for the simulated patients, and the six months after. In total, 245 hospitalists from 15 facilities at Novant Health participated. Over the 16 weeks that the providers were actively engaged in the short cases, evidence-based quality scores in the cases increased by 12%. Importantly, these improvements translated in real-world data with a 19% reduction in COPD-related pharmacy costs, and an annualized impact of 233 fewer inpatient days for COPD patients and 371 fewer revisits, leading to inpatient savings of $1M. Healthcare, 2021

Fifty cardiologists from the Ochsner Health System cared for two simulated patients in each of six assessment rounds occurring 4 months apart. Simulated patients presented with heart failure (HF), coronary artery disease (CAD), supraventricular tachyarrhythmia (SVT) or valvular heart disease. Using Ochsner’s patient-level data, we performed real-world pre–post analyses of physician practice changes, patient outcomes and costs. The cardiologists showed increased care standardization across the group, reduced readmissions, and $4.3M in annual savings in the real-world data. Open Heart, 2019