
The Airport Model: A Blueprint for Value-Based Care Success
By Jessica Robinson, Chief Platform Officer
Navigating value-based care (VBC) can feel as complex as managing a bustling airport-each step requiring careful coordination, clear direction, and seamless execution to reach your destination. Much like walking through an airport with its myriad of terminals, gates, and pathways, value-based care can overwhelm organizations with its intricate requirements and interconnected processes. Designed to improve patient outcomes, elevate care quality, and optimize costs, value-based care (VBC) is a transformative approach. Inspired by an airports efficient design, The Garage developed a solution: the Airport Model for Innovation, a strategic framework that simplifies the key elements of value-based care (VBC) and helps organizations soar towards improved patient outcomes, care quality, and cost efficiency. This intuitive, actionable roadmap empowers all organizations, at any starting point in their value-based care (VBC) journey.
Why the Airport Model?
Inspired by the complexity of early collaborations with Clinically Integrated Networks (CINs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), the Airport Model visually represents the journey to successful value-based care (VBC). Like an airport, each terminal and concourse symbolize a critical component, ensuring all operations are interconnected, efficient, and patient centered. This model empowers organizations to identify gaps, streamline workflows, and drive sustainable change. Each concourse aligns with the VBC organizational goals and empowered with workflows powered by the various gates.
Exploring the Terminals of Value-Based Care
Main Terminal: The Hub of Value-Based Care
The main terminal serves as the nerve center where all data, information, and security processes converge. Here, VBC organizations manage patient information, route critical insights to the appropriate destinations, and ensure seamless communication across the system. Just as an airport's main terminal ensures the smooth movement of passengers, this hub orchestrates the flow of essential operations in a VBC program.
Population Management Terminal
The population management terminal is the key to achieving successful population health management, and includes three pivotal concourses:
- Operational Management: Focuses on streamlining care delivery processes and resource allocation.
- Financial Management: Enabling transparency and supporting the financial sustainability of the organization.
- Provider Engagement: Engages and empowers care providers to align with VBC goals, improving collaboration and patient outcomes.
Reporting and Analytics Terminal
Data is the fuel driving VBC. This terminal, with its Clinical Metrics and Quality Metrics concourses, offers insights to measure and enhance performance. By adhering to value-based payment contract requirements, organizations can use these insights to track progress, identify improvement opportunities, and showcase measurable success.
Patient Engagement Terminal
Patients are the heart of value-based care (VBC), and this terminal focuses on keeping them connected. The Mobile Engagement and Telemedicine concourses enable proactive communication and access to care, ensuring patients stay informed and engaged in their health journey. These gates create a seamless connection between patients and care teams, fostering trust, transparency, and long-term relationships, improving the overall patient experience.
Care Coordination Terminal
Coordinating care is critical to ensuring patients receive the right care at the right time. This terminal houses concourses such as:
- Health Information Exchange (HIE): Facilitates the secure and efficient sharing of patient data.
- Care Transitions: Focuses on minimizing gaps during transitions between care settings.
- Care Interventions: Directly connects patients to interventions that prevent complications and improve outcomes.
Collaborating for Innovation
The Airport Model is more than just a conceptual framework; it's a call to action. By leveraging this roadmap, organizations can identify areas needing innovation, collaborate with partners like The Garage, and build tailored solutions. Each concourse and gate offer opportunities to address emerging challenges, refine processes, and make a lasting impact on patient care.
Collaboration in Action - Proven Outcomes in Value-Based Care (VBC)
Ways The Garage's The Airport Model has helped our customers:
Fraud Detection for an ACO: An ACO managing 60,000 members in PA and NJ uncovered potential fraud involving 10 durable medical equipment (DME) companies, potentially costing Medicare $2-3 billion. NAACOS and the Institute of Accountable Care flagged a 629% urinary catheter billing increase. Working with The Garage and using a data warehouse and PowerBI to investigate, they identified a $2.8M CMS loss and $2.0M shared savings impact. The Garage has since developed fraud monitoring dashboards to prevent future losses.
Quality Improvement for a Physicians Group: A multi-specialty group serving 100,000 lives in NY partnered with The Garage to improve analytics with their 9 value-based care contracts. After payers flagged incomplete quality data, the group leveraged Bridge's Insights application to compare claims across payers, uncovering additional metrics that improved their quality scores. This effort led to a $236K increase in shared savings by validating payer's data with supplemental evidence from Bridge.
Read more use cases here.
About The Garage: Leading Innovation in Value-Based Care
At The Garage, innovation isn't just a buzzword, it's part of our DNA. The Airport Model reflects our commitment to simplifying complexity, fostering collaboration, and delivering solutions that matter and drive impactful healthcare transformation. Whether you're embarking on your VBC journey or looking to refine your approach, the Airport Model offers a clear, actionable path.
The Garage is more than a health tech company; we're catalysts for change in the value-based care landscape. Creating innovative, digital-first, data-first, platform-based, human-centric innovations that empower organizations in value-based care, we are guided by our mission to change healthcare for good…one community at a time, Our population health management platform, Bridge, is the industry's most comprehensive and effective platform on the market for value-based care. EHR and backend agnostic and designed for rapid implementation with best practices built-in, Bridge delivers measurable improvements with best-in-class ROI in 6 months or less.
Explore the Airport Model for Innovation with us and learn how it can guide your organization toward better outcomes and sustainable success in value-based care. Together, we can change healthcare for good. Learn more today!