Valence Health, a leading provider of clinical integration and data management solutions, today announced that St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital IPA (www.stlukestexas.com) in Houston, TX, has chosen Valence to help it become a clinically integrated provider organization. Valence offers the tools and technology infrastructure that enables entities like St. Luke’s to integrate data, improve physician performance and advance the quality of care to patients without changing the way physicians do business.
Executives at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital IPA recognized the importance of aggregating physician and hospital data to improve quality of care, facilitate hospital initiatives and increase overall efficiency. The hospital’s 500 independent physicians were ready to clinically integrate by collaborating and connecting electronically to collect office-based claims data, coupled with hospital data, to provide better care for patients.
“We had all of this data — patient information, physician notes, claims data — that we knew could be used to provide better patient care if we had it all coordinated in one easy-to-use system,” said Susan Kiley, vice president and chief managed care officer, St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System. “Valence Health has an excellent understanding of the physician world and the reasons that we at St. Luke’s were looking to clinically integrate. It has been able to provide us with a method of collecting and combining the data that is efficient and unobtrusive, allowing us to reap the benefits of clinical integration.”
“St. Luke’s has long been committed to providing exceptional quality services to its physicians,” said C. George Kevorkian, MD, president, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital IPA. “By teaming up with Valence, St. Luke’s will most certainly become a clinically integrated organization.”
Valence is assisting St. Luke’s with the selection of clinical protocols and guidelines for their clinical integration program that will affect the quality of care delivered to a majority of patients in its hospital population. Using vMine, Valence’s application for mining physician practice data, Valence is able to collect patient level data from disparate physician billing systems, aggregate the data into a single repository, and report variations in care for the organization as a whole and for individual physicians. This information becomes a powerful tool for helping physicians to work collaboratively, and focus on areas where quality improvement is most needed.
“The proper management and coordination of data and patient information can very often be daunting for IPAs and PHOs,” said Phil Kamp, president and CEO, Valence Health. “Helping organizations like St. Luke’s to clinically integrate and streamline its processes benefits the patients, the physicians and the hospital which, in turn, results in better overall quality of care.”
About Valence Health
Chicago-based Valence Health was formed in 1996 with the goal of providing data management and consulting support to provider owned organizations. Over the past several years, our team of experts has grown and so has our suite of products. We’ve built upon our data analytics and medical management expertise, and added third party administration, development of custom web-based applications, and clinical integration support to our list of core competencies. What hasn’t changed is our focus…providing innovative solutions to meet the needs of providers. For more information call (312) 277-6304 or visit www.ValenceHealth.com.
St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System (www.stlukestexas.com) includes St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, founded in 1954 by the Episcopal Diocese of Texas; St. Luke’s The Woodlands Hospital; St. Luke’s Episcopal Health Charities, a charity devoted to assessing and enhancing community health, especially among the underserved; and KS Management Services, LLC, overseeing 18 area clinic locations. St. Luke’s Sugar Land Hospital is under construction, scheduled to open in October 2008, and St. Luke’s Clear Lake Hospital is scheduled to open in 2010. Plans are underway for St. Luke’s Lakeside Hospital in The Woodlands. St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital is home to the Texas Heart(R) Institute, which was founded in 1962 by Denton A. Cooley, MD, and is consistently ranked nationally among the top 10 cardiology and heart surgery centers in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Affiliated with several nursing schools and two medical schools, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital was the first hospital in Texas named a Magnet hospital for nursing excellence, and twice has been honored with the Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence(TM) by HealthGrades, a leading independent company that measures healthcare quality in hospitals. The Health System has been recognized by FORTUNE as among the “100 Best Companies to Work For” and by the Houston Business Journal as a top employer in Houston. St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System also was honored as one of Modern Healthcare magazine’s “100 Best Places to Work.”
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