Sound Physicians

Optimizing Performance Across Episodes of Care and an Ecosystem of Providers

As a national physician practice that has partnerships with hundreds of hospitals across the United States, Sound Physicians has a reputation as a leader in physician performance improvement. Ever advancing, Sound Physicians has brought even greater focus to its performance management strategy and program.

Sound Physicians partnered with ArborMetrix to develop a robust data and analytics infrastructure to gain intelligence across the entire acute care episode for the company’s 3,500+ clinicians working across the country. The solution integrates clinical and financial performance data from Sound Physicians’ service lines onto a single healthcare analytics and intelligence platform, and puts rich, clinically-relevant data into the hands of its regional operators and physicians to drive front-line provider engagement and operational excellence.

“ArborMetrix provides us with reliable, data-driven insights to clinical and financial performance of our programs, including our performance in value-based programs such as BPCI-A,” said Jess Parks, President, Sound Physicians. “Their ability to integrate multiple data sources and visualize results has changed the game for us – really boosting our confidence to both accurately evaluate risk and drive increased effectiveness in our clinical operations.”

As a result of the ArborMetrix implementation, Sound Physicians is able to:

• Optimize clinical and financial performance across the entire acute care episode.
• Mitigate risk under payment models such as BPCI-A.
• Improve outcomes for programs such as the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).
• Reduce variation in acute care costs, understand drivers of post-acute costs, enable predictive analytics, and drive real-time interventions.

ArborMetrix enables Sound Physicians to deliver targeted clinical and financial performance insights to its teams in real time. Everyone from the executive team to regional operators and individual providers can easily drill down and compare performance for a hospital team, make geographic comparisons, and pinpoint individual provider performance across hundreds of hospitals nationwide. Armed with robust analytics, Sound Physicians can fine-tune its operational approach to delivering high value care for patients and partners.

“We now have a platform that has the power to deliver the same clinically meaningful metrics from the senior executive level down to individual providers,” said Jocelyn Ludwick, Senior Vice President, Business Intelligence and Analytics, Sound Physicians. “We can risk-adjust the data to determine, for example, that a dip in performance one month was caused by a bad influenza season rather than a factor within our control. In an underperforming region, we can drill down to the division, site and provider level to see if there’s an outlier or an opportunity with an entire team.”

Predictive Analytics Tool, SoundPredict, Determines Patients’ Readmission Likelihood

Sound focuses its clinical strategy and resources on value-based payment models such as the Bundled Payment for Care Improvement–Advanced (BPCI-A) program. The goal of these programs is to reduce healthcare costs while improving patient outcomes.

To support participation in these programs, Sound relies on SoundPredict, a predictive analytic engine powered by ArborMetrix. This engine leverages rich clinical information from Sound’s 3,500+ clinicians to predict likelihood of readmission, program eligibility, and other condition-specific factors that inform clinical workflows. This tool helps Sound determine which patients receive certain interventions such as tele-SNF encounters, follow-up appointment scheduling prior to the patient leaving the hospital, and post-discharge telephone outreach from nurses and advanced-practice providers.

With SoundPredict updates, analytics reduced the predicted at-risk population by 17.5%. The narrower and more accurate the predicted eligible population, the better Sound can focus targeted interventions, manage resources, reduce costs, and improve outcomes for that patient group.

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