3M and Edifecs Team to Promote ‘Value-Based’ Healthcare

Health technology company Edifecs and 3M are collaborating to promote value-based payment models in healthcare.

The companies say their joint effort combines 3M Health Information Systems tools with “Edifecs’ stable and scalable value-based care platform,” as 3M Global Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sandeep Wadhwa said in a Tuesday (Jan. 10) news release.

The companies say their collaboration can overcome the difficulty of establishing alternative payment models by “merging provider experience and member health information to increase data sharing between payers and providers.”

The release says this will promote the use of value-based payment contracts “through greater transparency across critical data and facilitate providers’ move into two-sided risk contracts.”

As PYMNTS wrote last year, the expansion of cost-conscious, value-based care models is one of the key components of the evolution of the healthcare world.

“By linking treatments to results — in short, delivering more patient and insurer value for the dollar by improving outcomes — many believe the sector can increase efficacy and lower costs,” PYMNTS wrote.

Illustrating the role it plays in government health programs, for example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) says that value-based programs “reward health care providers with incentive payments for the quality of care they give to people with Medicare,” and are “part of our larger quality strategy to reform how healthcare is delivered and paid for.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS has explored how the healthcare sector has some catching up to do when it comes to digital payments.

There are a number of contributing factors, we noted in October, among them the ongoing move to patients bearing larger levels of responsibility for their healthcare payments, along with billing systems that haven’t caught up.

And while there’s been some movement on that front, Paymentus Head of Product and Partnerships Chris Trainor told PYMNTS in an interview that “50% of consumers say healthcare bills are the most difficult of any bill that they have to pay. It’s still problematic.”

Adding to the issue is the nonrecurring nature of healthcare payments, especially for elective procedures and specialties, as well as confusion about what has and hasn’t been paid.

“If you look at investments being made by health systems, they are going up as it pertains to digitizing interactions with patients, as well as unifying back-end systems,” Trainor said. “Without unification, you’re going to have disparate experiences. That’s where we’ve historically seen disparate systems and no unification lead to fragmented customer-patient experiences.”