Philadelphia Network Transforms Health Centers with Population Health Management Solutions

San Francisco, CA, May 14, 2014 --(PR.com)-- In December 2012, 37 Health Center Controlled Networks (HCCN) were awarded more than $18 million to expand the use of heath information technology. Now, one of those networks, the Health Federation of Philadelphia (HFP), is proudly sharing its progress. The organization partnered with i2i Systems, a leading population health management (PHM) solution provider that is also the PHM solution of choice for 12 other HCCNs.

Since 1983, HFP has served as a network of the community health centers in Southeastern Pennsylvania, enabling the region’s federally qualified health centers and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health to work toward the shared goal of improving health by expanding access to high-quality care.

Once EHRs were implemented across the centers, HFP recognized the health centers’ need for a shared vision for analytics to best leverage health data for pay-for-performance initiatives, improvement of patient care outcomes and to facilitate required reporting.

After receiving HCCN funding, HFP set an aggressive goal to deploy i2i Systems’ PHM solutions, i2iTracks and PopIQ, across 10 health centers with 29 total care sites to standardize proactive care and analytics tools and approaches. One year later, seven centers with 24 sites are now live and have multiple success stories to share in both care-team efficiency and identifying gaps in care.

i2iTracks is being deployed in three cohorts to stagger resource requirements and allow knowledge to spread across centers as care teams begin using the new PHM tools. Four of the HFP’s health centers went live on i2iTracks last fall and three more followed this spring. The first cohort was able to use i2iTracks to help prepare their UDS reports for 2013 and this month, five centers will begin the process of applying for NCQA-PCMH Recognition using i2iTracks as a key part of that application.

“We expect that i2iTracks will be an essential tool in this process,” said Suzanne Cohen, Director of Member Services and Public Affairs at Health Federation of Philadelphia. “The members have found that implementing i2iTracks has given them new insight into how their EHR is being used and has helped them to improve the validity of their data.”

i2iTracks has helped the health centers and network achieve success in other grant-funded efforts as well. For example, i2iTracks reports are now being used to measure the effectiveness of a project to increase rates of routine HIV testing.

In addition to deploying i2iTracks at each center to support local PHM activities, HFP is also implementing a strategic analytics tool to support network level performance improvement efforts across all centers and to foster sharing of best practices. i2i Systems’ PopIQ, a cloud-based tool, will bring data together from the disparate EHRs across HFP’s health centers, including NextGen, GE Centricity, Practice Partner, and Success EHS. PopIQ automatically extracts EHR data in real time, standardizes it and aggregates it into performance measure sets for trending and mining of clinical quality measures across health centers and sites. The first cohort of centers is currently streaming data into the PopIQ platform and the second cohort is not far behind. Since i2iTracks and PopIQ manage data in concert, once a center has deployed i2iTracks, PopIQ deployment is just a few additional steps.

HFP stated its success is largely due to the support of i2i Systems’ team of experts. “i2i Systems has been an invaluable partner in helping our health centers best leverage the PHM tools, and [supporting us] all through implementation, even when it’s not easy,” Cohen said. “We greatly appreciate i2i Systems’ approach to working with us as a network, keeping HFP aware of contact with the individual health centers and feeding us information about the needs that are being expressed by them.”

HFP foresees a time soon when its health centers are transparently leveraging outcomes and performance with payers and partner healthcare institutions in powerful ways they have not been able to in the past. HFP sees the access to data, information and intelligence enabled by i2iTracks and PopIQ as being critical to future participation in value-based payment models.