The transition to value-based care may seem daunting for many healthcare leaders, especially those who operate independently and have less margin for error when it comes to implementing new systems and initiatives.
Flagler Health is a technology company offering AI tools and other advanced technologies to streamline many aspects of patient care for medical practices. Albert Katz, Flagler’s CEO and co-founder, told Becker’s that AI may be the answer for ASC leaders looking for a way to smooth out their organization’s transition to value-based care.
Mr. Katz said that referral processes are one area, particularly in musculoskeletal care, where advanced technologies can cut out inefficiencies, improve patient outcomes and save ASCs money — all while working toward the transition to value-based care.
“If you could create one tool, how would you fix it all?” he said. For Mr. Katz, it all begins with patient triage.
“[Musculoskeletal care] is kind of this linear, progressing disease and AI is the perfect tool to predict when a patient’s going to get worse, what treatments they need and for what diseases,” he said. After a year of development, his team has created an algorithm that he told Becker’s is 90% accurate in its predictions.
The true power of this tool lies in its ability to imbue the practice itself with data, metrics and patient tracking — reducing the need to seek out private equity or other corporatized groups due to resource constraints.
“We finally have something that we can offer to clinics that, in the fee-for-service world, does great because it helps them make more money,” he said. “They don’t need to sell to PE as quickly. We can take off their back office expenses. We can basically make sure that these [hundreds] of pages of patient notes are summarized into a few bullet points that are relevant and come with a recommendation, and tell you these insurance companies will reimburse for this treatment that we recommend.”
According to Mr. Katz, Flagler’s AI triage tool identifies patients who are unlikely to need surgery and refers them directly to more conservative treatments, such as physical therapy or interventional pain management, bypassing orthopedic consults when it’s not necessary but keeping the patient in the system as opposed to losing the patient to an outside provider. This reduces patient leakage, improves outcomes, and saves money for both practices and patients.
“For us, triaging into these spaces is something that has helped us save a lot more money than just doing virtual PT on an iPad,” he said. He added that through improving patient triaging and coordination, surgeons are able to dedicate more time to patients who will actually require surgeries — allowing them to do more of the work they are trained in while increasing revenue.
The platform is being used by more than 30 states and by more than 1,000 providers, Mr. Katz said. His vision for the platform is for ASCs to fully incorporate it into their practice and eventually utilize it to collect metrics about their performance that can help negotiate better rates with payers, ultimately supporting the transition to value-based care for independent groups.
These clinics only have so many resources. They might not have the ability to call patients and track how they’re doing. So we’ll do that for them,” he said. “Everything that a clinic might need that they do not offer — we will offer that for them.”
This will also include operational functions like reminding physicians to send out referrals, notes or other administrative tasks, all fed back into a facility’s EMR.
“You finally have everything in one place,” he said.
