MEMBER PROFILE
Gregg Gascon
During 2018, each monthly Brief will include a member profile where we ask our guest to answer three questions we believe other members would be interested in learning more about.
Our second member profile features Gregg Gascon, PhD, CHDA, Clinical Data Scientist, OhioHealth Group Clinically Integrated Network.
Q. What is a key focus for your health and well-being initiatives in the coming months?
A. At the OhioHealth Group we’re focused on implementing six bundled payments in 2018 retrospectively and in 2019 as a single bill visible to members. To support the efforts of the physicians, nurses and other health care professionals, we’ve analyzed several levers to improve the efficiency of medical procedures and optimize patient outcomes. By capturing procedural data by episode, we’re working with our clinical guidance councils to share the results of care transformations with providers to facilitate performance and quality improvement. We’re also bringing a condition-based bundle to our employee health plan this year that will emphasize non-surgical pathways for knee osteoarthritis treatments that feature some of the latest work in regenerative orthopedic medicine. Lastly, we’re completing program evaluations of our asthma and diabetes management programs as well as our diabetes prevention program in an effort to improve the health of those populations.
Q. What’s a new professional resource (i.e.websites, measures, tools, books) you’ve found useful for improving your efforts?
A. Several books from AHIMA (http://www.ahima.org/) have proven to be quite valuable to the work, including texts on health information management, research methods, and statistics. The latest one that I’ve enjoyed is the second edition of Watzlaf and Forrestal’s Health Informatics Research Methods: Principles and Practice. It’s a highly engaging overview of the breadth of methods available to researchers in the field that reminds you of all the choices at your disposal- an echo of Webb, Campbell, Schwartz and Sechrest’s classic text Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social Sciences.
Q. What 2-3 metrics do you follow most closely that best capture the value proposition of your efforts in your organization?
A. We have a visual board review on a regular cadence at work that tracks the progress of our improvement opportunities on a wall chart through all the stages, including addressing the measurement issues, analysis, intervention exploration and design, implementation and evaluation. Each project has an SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation) report that allows staff to identify the costs, utilization, and benchmarks associated with a given procedure, supply or condition that’s been identified for outcome improvement. This helps our team see the improvements that we’ve forecasted and how well we’ve done.
