Intermountain awarded CMS innovation contract

Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based health system that includes 22 nonprofit hospitals, 185 clinics and a medical group with some 900 employed physicians, has been awarded $9.7 million contract as part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) Health Care Innovation Awards initiative.  

Intermountain was awarded the three-year contract to further its work to transform healthcare delivery to improve patient care quality while reducing costs. Medical cost savings from the three-year project are estimated to be more than $67 million. Results and processes developed through this initiative will be reported and shared with other U.S. healthcare systems in collaboration with CMS.

Intermountain has worked toward developing a new care delivery model using IT-based tools. Intermountain will further enhance its existing decision-support tool to include depression risk. In addition, Intermountain will develop new ways to deliver population-based data to primary care doctors to help patients with chronic conditions, such as asthma, diabetes and heart disease. Other efforts will be directed toward testing a new payment model to better align financial performance incentives with patient results.

In support of this effort, Intermountain will train and hire 12 new workers in health IT-related jobs, including research assistants, data analysts, data warehouse analysts and decision-support analysts.

 

Beth Walsh,

Editor

Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.

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