Provider-sponsored coordinated care organizations: designing systems for patient-centered care

PCCOs should take inventory of the information demands in the critical areas of quality, resource, and outcomes management, and standardize the data elements and definitions as the enterprise data model. The focus must be on internal and external reporting requirements as, ultimately, the data model must expedite clinical practice improvement initiatives. The Informational Processing Architecture utilizes the data warehouse for enterprise decision support to derive clinical/business rules and the operational data store/applications for clinical decision support to deploy those same rules at the point of care. As a result, clinical and financial systems should be tightly linked, associating outcomes, process, and cost. In designing these systems, the Systems Development Life Cycle methodology has the advantages of documented deliverables and a well proven methodology for outlining requirements put forth in an RFP, which is indispensable for vendor evaluation and selection. Employing these techniques ensures a user driven process that has the best chance of implementing the complex requirements of PCCOs.