It doesn’t get more exciting than this. Next summer, Texas Children’s employees will begin using a new and improved version of Healthy Planet, a module within the Epic Tapestry health care management system.
The arrival of Healthy Planet means better outcomes for more than 400,000 members of Texas Children’s Health Plan. But it also means less stress for our employees, lower costs for our organization and an even higher level of care across the entire system. (Can we get an Amen?!)
But how exactly is this possible?
Epic’s Healthy Planet application will help us keep track of how well we serve our members. It includes real-time and predictive analytics, daily metric dashboards, wellness registries, and chronic disease registries. It also contains information that allows us to compare our member data to national data on a variety of illnesses.
The module, with its dashboard, gives health care systems and providers information that can help coordinate care delivery, monitor quality and cost, reduce financial risk and engage members through a centralized data warehouse.
Benefits on both sides
“The Health Plan will benefit from having all care coordination documentation in one software system,” said Diane Scardino, Vice President at Texas Children’s Health Plan. “The Texas Children’s System also benefits because documentation for shared members will now live in one location.”
Healthy Planet will also make it possible for clinical care to be better aligned with social and community support for our families. “Outcomes for families will continue to improve because we’ll be able to target populations early, proactively intervene, and align needs,” Scardino added. “Interventions can further be reinforced through both the payor and provider partnerships.”
And if that wasn’t enough, the result of these benefits are bound to cause operational efficiencies as we reduce the need for manual and often duplicative information sharing across the organization.
Which brings us back to Care Coordination …
“It’s fair to say that we currently have a lot of fragmented communication taking place between our teams, both within the health plan and among our care delivery partners,” said Ashley Simms, director of Care Coordination at the health plan. “This will no longer be the case. Integrating into one platform not only creates a tremendous amount of workflow efficiencies, but facilitates more effective communication between the various care teams that work toward optimizing a person’s health.”
With communication more streamlined, employees can spend less time putting out fires and more time performing tasks that bring a higher level of patient satisfaction. This may include tasks like accessing the chronic disease and wellness registries to provide preventative information to patients.
Part of the Epic Tapestry implementation
Healthy Planet is a module being implemented as part of the health plan’s Epic Tapestry implementation. Its build, testing and launch are under the direction of the health plan. However, employees across Texas Children’s will be required to train for its use as our members are cared for throughout the organization.
All parts of the Tapestry project are set to go live in June of 2021. Due to Healthy Planet’s ability to meet such a wealth of needs, it is one of the more anticipated offerings.
Employees will be trained on how to use Healthy Planet and the rest of Epic Tapestry. Training details and dates will be announced at a later date.