Pull back the curtain on sophisticated data and sometimes you find a small, scrappy team driven by care and efficiency. That’s true for Nuvance Health, where Director of Population Health Operations Michelle Francis leads a lean but mighty crew. It’s also true for Arcadia, where we partner closely with our customers to turn numbers into action.
When Arcadia’s Vice President of Enterprise Partnerships Anna Basevich began working with the Nuvance team, it quickly became clear that agility was paramount — they needed reliable insights to make effective policies, and fast.
On a team where people-power is limited (but data isn’t), Arcadia stepped in to cut through the noise. Searching for a trend or an instance among thousands of EHRs can consume time that Francis’s team doesn’t have, so a cornerstone of our partnership is refining algorithms to make those discoveries.
“We have so much data that it can be easy to get lost,” Francis says, and Arcadia’s software serves as a map. The destination? Well, that’s up to Nuvance Health — it changes as their needs change, and together, we redraw that route often to identify inefficiencies and opportunities.
By “shortcutting to that lightbulb moment,” we do away with laborious digging and lay out useful information in a comprehensive, digestible way.
Our data pushes Nuvance Health to greater efficiency, but that relationship works both ways — their needs inform our platform. Where there’s a void, we innovate together.
Francis’s team looks at data in new ways, to broach new and emerging problems, which prompts us to build supportive tools we can roll out to partners throughout our network. That could ultimately mean 100,000,000 patients whose lives are bettered by this mutual effort.
“Whenever they create something, if it’s an initiative that we are not yet focusing on, it automatically pushes us to know that this is something we need to move towards,” Francis says. The scaffolding that supports this relationship? Trust, built hours and projects at a time, and a mutual mission to better patient lives.
When we unrolled new tools around end-of-life care, Nuvance Health was one of the first to take advantage. In the past, finding the right candidates for palliative services meant individually combing through records, sifting through patient files and conducting time-intensive phone evaluations.
“At the center of it all, it’s always the patient,” Francis says.
By standardizing an approach — pinpointing key markers in the data, then reaching out proactively — Nuvance Health gives their patients and families agency, allowing them to take advantage of services that might better their final days. This benefits patients, clinicians, and administrators. It’s what we’d call a win (win, win).
Nuvance Health’s challenge, like so many other health networks, is minimizing inefficient process in favor of efficient, empathetic care. From cost effectiveness to quality, the mitigating factors are both important and intimidating.
The ground shifts daily, but people are at the heart of every decision. Intricate problems require novel solutions. With data, we can get there together.