PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tonic Health announced today that it has been selected by MedStar Health, the largest healthcare provider in Maryland and the Washington D.C. region, to implement a system-wide Chronic Care Management (CCM) services program.
Since 2013, MedStar Health has utilized Tonic’s fun and interactive platform in its hospitals and clinics to seamlessly manage patient interactions across a range of touchpoints, including patient intake, patient satisfaction and patient reported outcomes. Tonic offers a complete view of the patient by integrating best-in-class online survey capabilities with best-in-class CRM and analytics functionality.
“Patient interactions today – and the data that comes from them – are disjointed, which results in a fragmented view of the patient,” said Sterling Lanier, CEO of Tonic Health. “Our goal is to provide a much deeper understanding of the patient and an engaging patient and staff experience. Our platform is ideally suited to CCM, which is unique in that it relies on patient-reported data not commonly found in electronic health records, such as the capture of patient’s preferences and care goals. We are excited to help MedStar implement streamlined CCM services to improve patient care.”
“CCM presents many challenges and opportunities for patients and for hospital systems. MedStar was faced with the significant challenge of how to deploy CCM across our Medicare population,” said Rohit Gulati, M.D., Assistant Vice President of Medical Affairs at MedStar Union Memorial Hospital. “Tonic solves many of the logistical problems, ensuring that this opportunity to improve patient care will not be lost. We are pleased to be expanding our longstanding relationship with Tonic Health with the implementation of this innovative and easy-to-use solution.”
In January 2015 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began offering reimbursement for Medicare patients with two or more chronic conditions who receive 20 minutes or more of non-face-to-face chronic care management services per month. These services, such as emails and phone calls, are billed an average of $42.60 per month per patient (adjusted based on geography) in addition to office visits and other in-person encounters, which are billed separately.
An estimated 35 million Medicare beneficiaries are eligible for CCM-related services, representing a significant opportunity to improve outcomes related to chronic conditions while ensuring physicians and hospitals are appropriately reimbursed for their time and resources. However, only 100,000 claims for CCM reimbursement were made in 2015, demonstrating a clear need to make the process easier for providers to undertake.
Tonic Health’s customizable digital platform allows hospital systems to streamline the complex government regulations for providing CCM and satisfy the three main requirements for reimbursement, including the management of patient opt-in and consent, the formation of comprehensive care plans, and the tracking of time spent on CCM services.
“Tonic enables us to broaden CCM within the scope of existing practice resources,” said Stuart Bell, M.D., Vice President of Medical Affairs at MedStar Union Memorial Hospital. “Tonic allows us to engage patients and caregivers through simple and friendly data collection technology administered on an iPad at the time of an office visit, or via any smartphone or computer at home.”
About Tonic Health
Tonic Health (www.tonicforhealth.com) is a leading patient management platform that uses high-touch patient data collection tools and real-time CRM functionality to dramatically improve the process of gathering, analyzing and acting upon patient data. The Tonic platform is secure and HIPAA-compliant, and interfaces with existing EMR installations and other backend databases. Based in Palo Alto, California, Tonic provides a fun and interactive experience for patients and staff alike across a broad range of top enterprise health system customers, including Partners HealthCare, New York-Presbyterian, Providence Health & Services, UCLA Health, UC Irvine Health, the Veterans Health Administration, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Cook Children’s, Park Nicollet, the American College of Cardiology, Emory Healthcare, and many more.
