Population Health
Paying for health paves the way for a healthier future
At Nemours Children’s Health, value-based care and population health go hand in hand. It’s why we’ve made intentional investments and built strategic partnerships that prioritize our commitment to the whole health of the child, as well as their community within and beyond the walls of our physical locations.
Care transformation — a key aspect of population health — is something that we have been successfully implementing across our enterprise for years. Today, our value-based efforts benefit from 20-plus years of a single, fully integrated electronic medical record (EMR) infrastructure as well as patient-centered primary care medical homes across our system. Our decades-long journey in continuous improvement steadily contributes to improving processes and communication and eliminating inefficiencies in the delivery of care.
Transforming the way health care is paid for is what will fundamentally promote better health. Evidence-based models show that social interventions work to improve health. Until recently, those efforts were unsustainable without payer reimbursement. Our efforts to transform payment are beginning to bear fruit. We’ve leveraged our enterprise team, including our Value-Based Services Organization alongside the Delaware Children’s Health Network (a clinically integrated network) to successfully put in place more than 13 value-based agreements, allowing Nemours Children’s to bend the cost curve, improve quality and reach our shared goals for value. One such contract with Medicaid includes incentives to identify and support social determinants of health (SDoH), improve quality and reduce disparities.
34,600 SDoH screenings offered to Delaware Valley primary care patients. Fourteen percent of families had at least one SDoH need.
Karen M. Wilding
Vice President, Chief Value Officer
Ms. Wilding leads our Value-Based Services Organization and Delaware Children’s Health Network supporting strategies that improve health care delivery across our system and within communities we serve. She explains, “As an anchor organization for communities, we are privileged to be part of some of the most intimate and impactful moments for families. There’s so much more to our patients’ lives than a brief encounter in primary care or a two-day stay in the hospital. We cannot think of our commitment to creating the healthiest generations without connecting to the larger picture of what health care means to that patient’s life, their family and to our community.”
