Clinical Integration
Healthcare reform, pay-for-performance, and cost-of-care efficiency are driving hospitals and physicians to move toward greater integration. The challenge for hospitals, health systems, and physicians is to create new, viable organizational structures that can respond to the market’s demand for quality and effective care – care that uses evidence-based protocols to guide resource utilization and improve the community’s health. As hospitals and physicians begin the search for effective ways to integrate, clinical integration (“CI”) should be considered as a core strategy.
Course Overview
Moderator: Virginia Tyler, FACHE
The Camden Group
Presenter: Eric Nielsen, M.D.
The Camden Group
Presenter: Graham Brown, MPH
The Camden Group
This course provides a basic understanding of what Clinical Integration means in the context of today’s healthcare organizations. The course emphasizes the importance of achieving integration in order to facilitate communication and coordination, thus maximizing quality and efficiency in the healthcare environment. It also outlines the steps an organization must take to achieve clinical integration, as well as the factors to consider in the process.
Time to view this course is 41 minutes.
Course Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of this course the student will:
- Understand the definition of and how to identify an organization that is Clinically Integrated
- Understand the legislation governing Clinically Integrated organizations
- Understand the key enablers of Clinical Integration
- Understand the meaning of Population Health and it’s affect on Clinical Integration
- Understand the steps and timelines to become clinically integrated
Time to complete the course is 80 minutes.
Presenter: Virginia Tyler, FACHE
Ms. Tyler is a vice president with The Camden Group and has more than 20 years of professional experience in the healthcare industry. She specializes in strategic planning and program development, mergers, service line planning, ACO, and clinical integration strategy, as well as capital project validations and ambulatory services strategy. She also has significant experience as a facilitator working on organizational development issues with senior management teams.
Prior to joining The Camden Group, Ms. Tyler served as president of Tyler Consulting, Inc., a national healthcare consulting firm, providing advisory services to hospitals and healthcare-related organizations. There, her areas of focus included board development, acute care strategic planning, provider network development, organizational consolidations, ACOs, American Nurses Credentialing Center Magnet designation, and foundations.
Ms. Tyler also previously served as associate director for Navigant Consulting, where she focused specifically on consolidation and mergers of academic medical centers, and Catholic hospital systems, as well as strategic advisory to health-related not-for-profits.
Ms. Tyler has also served as vice president, strategic planning and business development at Thompson Health in Canandaigua, New York. There, she oversaw all strategic planning, corporate communications, and managed care functions for this community health system consisting of seven corporations. She simultaneously functioned as chief administrator to two related entities.
Presenter: Dr. Eric Nielsen
Dr. Nielsen is a vice president with The Camden Group and the former chief medical officer at the Greater Rochester Independent Practice Association (“GRIPA”). He is an expert at helping organizations achieve clinical integration, as well as designing and implementing ACOs. Dr. Nielsen has assisted both small and large health systems to build clinically integrated networks and ACOs, providing the experience and expertise to support the planning and implementation for the organizational, clinical, and information technology (“IT”) infrastructure and for network development and physician engagement.
Dr. Nielsen championed GRIPA’s efforts toward achieving clinical integration as evidenced by GRIPA’s favorable Advisory Opinion from the FTC in September 2007. Under his leadership, GRIPA developed guidelines by and for its member physicians, a care management department integrated with physician offices, an IT infrastructure for sharing of clinical information across the continuum, and systems for monitoring the performance of individual providers and the network.
Dr. Nielsen has been a frequent speaker at national forums about clinical integration and accountable care.
Presenter: Graham Brown, MPH
Mr. Brown is a vice president with The Camden Group and has over 20 years of experience in the areas of payer negotiations, program administration, and change management with healthcare, government, and social service clients. He is an experienced leader in health information technology strategy, adoption, and implementation for the healthcare industry and governmental agencies and is an expert at business planning and implementation for clinical integration and ACO development. Mr. Brown has assisted numerous organizations to assess, design, contract, and implement health information technology solutions at the provincial, federal, and community level in the United States and Canada.
Prior to joining The Camden Group, Mr. Brown founded and served as principal of Gray Brown Consulting, a healthcare management consulting company, serving clients in Canada and the United States. His clients have included health systems, practice associations, provider organizations where he has counseled the executive group and senior clinical leaders in portfolio management of their clinical integration program, and developed clinical information systems, strategies, and measures to support their business, contractual, and revenue goals. Other clients include Cleveland Clinic Health System, the Ontario Smart Systems for Health Agency, the Ontario Association of Medical Laboratories, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Information. Before establishing his firm, Mr. Brown served as the legislative and policy advisor to the Minister of Community and Social Services and Long Term Care for the government of Ontario.
Developing Organization: The Camden Group
The Camden Group provides strategic advisory services to hospitals, health systems, medical groups, and payers throughout the United States. With over 1,000 clients in 48 states, The Camden Group is a leader in planning, finance, and operations consulting services.