Villanova, Pa. / Philadelphia, Pa., October 7, 2015 — The Delaware Valley Accountable Care Organization (DVACO) has joined HealthShare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania (HSX), greatly expanding the accountable care organization’s access to data that can improve patient care and lower healthcare costs. The nonprofit HSX is a health information organization, supported by some 40 hospitals and three health plans serving Philadelphia and its surrounding counties. HSX has established the Delaware Valley’s regional health information exchange (HIE).
DVACO operates under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), through an agreement with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). DVACO is the region’s largest Medicare accountable care organization (ACO), with more than 430 participating primary care physicians and over 65,000 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries, plus additional performance-based contracts with private payers, and significant growth expected in 2016.
“Critical to fulfilling our mission of delivering value-based, coordinated medical care is effective, timely, and accurate health information exchange,” says Katherine A. Schneider, MD, President and CEO of DVACO. “HSX gives us that opportunity by providing us the benefits of this region’s HIE. Through an innovative partnership with HSX and PatientPing, we gain near real-time information when our enrolled patients are admitted or discharged from almost every hospital in our primary service region. This information provides significant enhancement to our coordination capabilities and helps our care coordinators and primary care physicians manage the health of the individuals and populations we serve, building upon our successful first year in the MSSP.”
Says Martin Lupinetti, Executive Director of HSX, “We are thrilled to have DVACO as the first ACO to join our exchange. DVACO is one of the nation’s leading organizations of its kind, and access to HIE data and services will help it to enhance its performance even further, providing more tools to improve patient care and control healthcare costs.
Mirth serves as HSX’s IT vendor, including for receiving and routing admission-discharge-transfer (ADT) data from HSX member hospitals. PatientPing then processes and sends DVACO this hospital information, as well as real-time notifications from their broader community of skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies across the state.
“DVACO and HSX share an objective of improving coordination across the care continuum,” says Dr. Schneider. “With our team and our member providers more readily connected to real-time data, we expect many examples of better health outcomes, better care experience, and better value to result from this collaboration with HSX.”
About Delaware Valley ACO
The Delaware Valley Accountable Care Organization (DVACO) is a limited liability company that is owned by Main Line Health, Jefferson University and Hospitals, Holy Redeemer Health System, Doylestown Health, and Magee Rehabilitation Hospital. DVACO’s purpose is to enhance the quality of health care and reduce the growth rate of health care costs by acting as a convener, accelerator, and provider of the foundation needed to assist its participating members to transition from fee for service model, a business model focused on volume to a model focused on population health. DVACO operates under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and is currently the region’s largest Medicare ACO. For more information, please visit www.dvaco.org.
About HealthShare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Inc. (HSX)
HealthShare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Inc. (HSX) is a non-profit health information exchange organization serving the Delaware valley. Founded in 2009, HSX facilitates the exchange of patient data between hospitals and insurers within the region. Incorporated as a nonprofit organization, HSX was formed as a collaboration among major healthcare stakeholders, including health plans and acute-care hospitals across Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties to enable the electronic exchange of patient information to improve patient outcomes and to manage and lower healthcare costs. For more information, please visit http://www.hsxsepa.org/.
Contacts:
DVACO:
Bridget Therriault
484 580-1025 (office)
484 2229154 (cell)