Price Transparency
Novant Health integrated community health workers and a care connections specialist into a community resource center setting, making it easier for individuals to access critical resources. Why does this build trustworthiness? Making services available to patients in locations that they already visit demonstrates caring and provides comfort and safety for patients from historically marginalized populations.
How It Works
It is not uncommon for patients to have anxiety as they plan for a medical event, especially if they have had limited experience with hospitalization or procedures. Helping patients establish reasonable expectations around the costs of their healthcare can reduce their anxiety, improving health and healing. In the episode of care products, by informing a patient up-front what their costs will be, they are able to focus on their care journey and returning to health and wellness.
Skills and Competencies
Providing an up-front cost for an episode of care product requires a clearly defined and consistently executed care pathway rooted in evidence-based practice.The care pathway also serves to connect often fragmented components of the care delivery process through strong coordination and help navigating the episode. Analytical capability marrying clinical and claim-based data is important to arriving at a price that efficiently addresses necessary care and contemplates frequently utilized services
Origins
For several years, Novant Health has been working to change the way we think about, design, price, and deliver care to reflect a consumer perspective. When considering planned care, often consumers try and understand how much they will be expected to pay for that healthcare experience. Oftentimes the answer is complex, and they can be left with unanswered questions or receive bills they were not expecting. We set out to design a healthcare experience that aligns with what a consumer expects; a group of included services that makes sense to them, no surprise bills, and an easy to understand cost.
Effectiveness
To date, more than 200 of our team members have chosen the episode of care benefit for their medical concern. Overwhelmingly (99% of respondents), members would recommend the episode benefit to their friends and co-workers.Though it’s still early, we’re seeing reductions in unnecessary emergency department care, no readmissions (2020), and members tell us they feel well-prepared for their procedure or childbirth. We continue to have opportunity to refine the process of delivering a single bill and look forward to furthering improvement.
Scalability
Our team member episode of care product is in use by team members spanning all our markets and facilities. More than 200 of our team members have enjoyed reduced or eliminated out-of-pocket cost for their episode of care, in addition to remarkable quality and a high-touch experience. We look forward to enabling other employers in our region to provide the same kind of innovative and consumer-oriented healthcare experiences as part of their benefit plans very soon.