Last week, thousands of health plans, healthcare providers and healthcare technology executives descended on Nashville to drive spirited conversation around best practices for elevating member satisfaction, matching appropriate risk adjustments with care adherence and improving Star Ratings for Medicare Advantage plans.
Over the course of the three-day RISE National Conference, the ReferWell team welcomed the opportunity to be front and center in discussions around transforming access to care and getting people to the doctor. At the booth, executives demonstrated the tangible impact of the ReferWell platform and our unique care concierge services to conference attendees.
Top-line observations from this year’s event? In 2024, there was an uptick in conference quality, ranging from the caliber of speakers to the exhibitor lineup and the many, deeper conversations we had with our industry peers, each uniquely concentrated on tackling healthcare’s most pressing challenges head on. When one cuts through the event noise and marketing buzzwords, this year’s focus was less around bringing quality and risk adjustment data together, but rather how we can optimize the chances of a completed and productive preventative care visit. This includes an increased emphasis on how to make the most of scheduled provider visits from an assessment perspective, with a goal of driving more members to appropriate follow up care as needed, ensuring that newly identified conditions are being treated and an expedited manner.
A few other key takeaways:
Prospective Care is Only as Good as Your Ability to Get Patients to Appointments: New initiatives related to prospective healthcare will continue to be created and validated, but the full potential of the model can only be realized if patients get to their providers for assessment and treatment. As a first step, we need to simplify the traditionally complex problem of getting people to the right care. This starts with health plans and providers overcoming costly and resource-intensive administrative hurdles while simplifying the complexity of matching members with the necessary health resources—from their initial visit to their primary care physician and throughout their care journeys.
Cybersecurity was the Elephant in the Room: Almost a month ago, the Change Healthcare data breach brought our nation’s healthcare system to its knees, crippling providers’ ability to seek reimbursement for services and, in many instances, forcing them to seek alternative revenue sources to keep their practices afloat. As the industry continues to grapple with the fallout of the attacks, it will force decision-makers not only to reconsider how they protect their IT infrastructure in the future, but also how they engage with patients and connect them to the necessary care resources when traditional approaches are forced off the rails.
AI Continues to be Front and Center but Cannot Replicate the Human Touch: Another year, another healthcare industry conference dominated by fierce debates around both the reward and the risk of applying machine learning in healthcare. While there is no denying the benefits of the technology’s ability to unlock new insights and streamline the way providers and patients interact with healthcare data, this year’s conversations focused on the continued need to augment generative AI advancements with human interventions. Moving forward, finding this balance should prove critical to ensuring that the systems are used safely, reliably and ethically in the future.
Getting Patients to the Doctor - Period - Continues to be a Challenge: At the end of the day, getting Medicare Advantage members to their provider is a challenge that concerns health plan executives and is crucial for improving health, adherence to quality metrics, and assessing and managing health risks effectively. It marks the first step toward better health outcomes. At ReferWell, we are dedicated to making the complex problem of getting members to the right care easy. Our scheduling platform and care concierge team are designed specifically to remove this administrative burden, getting patients scheduled for care, and increasing show rates to help reach organizational goals.
Missed an opportunity to connect with the ReferWell team at RISE National 2024? Let’s keep the conversations going! Reach out today.