LTPAC HIT Summit Puts Spotlight on Connecting LTPAC Settings

This week, AMDA - The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine was a key player at the 12th Annual Long-Term and Post-Acute Care (LTPAC) Health Information Technology (HIT) Summit in Reston, VA. Alex Bardakh, MPP, the Society’s Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, moderated a two-hour session with a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) panel of experts followed by a reactor panel of LTPAC clinical and facility providers. The CMS panel, which included Shari Ling, MD, Deputy Chief Medical officer, Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, Tara McMullen, PhD, Quality Measures and Health Assessment Group, Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, and Kevin Larsen, MD, CMS Enterprise Lean Lead and Health IT Advisor, stressed the importance of the LTPAC sector in the spectrum of health care. Dr. Ling stressed that the LTPAC sector sometimes gets lost in the policy conversation and urged the LTPAC community to stress to policymakers its value to providing quality care. She added that “Quality is the foundation for all that you will see moving forward.” Dr. McMullen stressed the need to standardize data elements across the different LTPAC settings – home health, skilled nursing facility, long-term care hospital - in order to seamlessly exchange data and uniformly report on quality. Building on the conversation, Dr. Larsen added that all providers will be inter-dependent on each other’s information in order to succeed in value-based models. “We're not just producers of information; we are mutually responsible for the information, not just shoving it out of our system,” he said.

The reactor panel included Brad Markowitz, a Senior Executive within Team Health, the largest clinical provider of post-acute services, Chuck Czarnik, Vice-President of Strategic Planning at Brookdale Senior Living, and Donna Doneski, Director of Policy and Membership at the National Association for the Support of Long-Term Care (NASL). The panel expressed concern about the initial lack of funding in the LTPAC sector to implement HIT and the current administrative complexity that requires its use to be successful under value-based medicine models. Participation in the Bundled Payment Care Initiative (BPCI) requires full exchange of information between all sectors of health care, stressed Mr. Markowitz. He added that the current administrative requirements under the Quality Payment Program could drive clinicians away from LTPAC practice unless policymakers focus on effective use of HIT in clinician’s current workflow and ensure they are not penalized for taking care of the nation’s elderly, who require more use of resources than patients in other settings. Data must be able to flow freely across health care settings and clinician practices and there is work in Congress to ensure data blocking is prohibited, explained Ms. Doneski. Focus on population health through data collection from multiple providers was key In Brookdale’s work with Innovation Award from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), said Mr. Czarnik.

Another highlight of the Summit included a presentation from Tom Edmondson, MD, CMD, Chair of the American Board of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine (ABPLM) on the use of telehealth in LTPAC including skilled nursing facilities (SNFs).

For full coverage of the Summit, click here.