Smarter Care, ACO Strategies and Leveraging the Power of Digital Health | #CHC18 Day 5

The last full day of #CHC18 wrapped Wednesday evening with the annual Cerner Bash at Kansas City's Power & Light district. This year, we celebrated in true Kansas City fashion with a jazz theme, and clients, partners and industry influencers soaked up the chance to unwind, unplug and catch up on happenings around the conference.

In keeping with tradition, Emerald City Band was the featured entertainment for the evening, and they kept spirits high and kept the party going all night with cover songs from across the decades. (We even had a special guest musician: Our own CEO Brent Shafer joined the band on bass guitar for a mini-set.) Between sets, we also enjoyed performances from Kansas City dance troupe Quixotic. It was the perfect cap to a busy and energetic conference. 

The Solutions Gallery had an opening reception on Tuesday evening, and then was open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday and from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Thursday. For a total of 23 hours, the Solutions Gallery featured over 150 of Cerner’s solutions, services, partners and client achievement stories on full display. 

On Thursday, we had a half-day of education sessions covering topics from restructuring accountable care organization (ACO) strategies to transforming health care through digital innovation. Here are today’s highlights:

Smarter care and the evolving industry

In a special edition episode of The Cerner Podcast, we bring insights from the 2018 Cerner Health Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, where more than 12,000 attendees from across the country and the globe have come together to learn and network. Sit at the table with us as we have conversations with health care leaders, Cerner clients and industry influencers. We’ll be covering health IT trends and focusing on this year’s CHC theme of “Smarter Care.”

In Thursday's episode, we hear from Michelle Rathman, rural health strategist and influencer. Since founding Impact! Communications in 1989, Michelle’s work has made her an invaluable voice among rural health advocates. We also welcome Emil Peters, president of Cerner Global. Emil shares how he's watched CHC evolve in his decade-spanning career with Cerner and talks about how the health care industry is changing -- and how health care providers and IT organizations must change with it.

Building the structure for an ACO or CIN strategy 

Speakers from Centrus Health, a clinically integrated network (CIN) in Kansas City, and Geisinger, an ACO in Pennsylvania, discussed their different organizational structures. 

With value-based care, health systems are now measured based on quality of care and reduced overall cost. This has created the need for different structures like CIN and ACO. Centrus Health described how CIN is a vehicle to achieve population health goals without consolidation. Providers partner through CIN, which leads the network to drive unified efforts toward care transformation. Geisinger explained their ACO structure that is creating value for Medicare patients.

"The more you know about the patients, the better you can take care of them," said Gregory Strevig, vice president of enterprise analytics at Geisinger.

Leveraging the power of digital for health care innovation 

Eric Langshur, the co-founder and CEO of AVIA, discussed how the health care industry can boost productivity by unlocking the power of digital. In a power session, he explained why digital innovation is the only efficient way to achieve affordability and drive growth and how technology, people and process come together in a new world powered by digital. 

“The cost of being a digital lager is exhaustive. If we're not getting ahead, we're going to be left behind,” Langshur said, adding that we need to ask ourselves a key question: "Are we optimizing digital as a new class to really elevate our businesses?" 

Langshur also shared three steps for digitizing the health care industry and leveraging technology to move us forward:

• Understand the current state of your company's digital capabilities
• Assess the maturity, impact and ROI of digitizing
• Develop a customized and strategic roadmap of how to get there

Cerner Health Conference (CHC) is Cerner’s annual, industry-leading health care event, taking place this year from Oct. 7-11 at the Kansas City Convention Center. For more Cerner news and health IT insights, and to keep up to date with all the happenings at #CHC18, make sure you're following us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.