Firefly Health | Case Study

Charting a course together – Firefly Health + Elation Health

The right care changes everything for members, and Firefly’s goal is to deliver value-based healthcare that results in improved financial, clinical, and experiential outcomes that benefit organizations, employees, and their families. In order to do so, Firefly delivers tightly coordinated care, and shared documentation, enabled by modern technology.

At Elation Health, we know that primary care is the single-most important lever in controlling healthcare costs. We also know we are at a crucial point in time, when building long-term partnerships with primary care visionaries, like Firefly, is paramount to the long-term health of our communities, and our healthcare system.

Firefly chose the Elation clinical-first platform for several key reasons. The Elation EHR is built on modern technology and is easy-to-use, with cloud-based platform services that connect clinical documentation and actionable clinical data. Four years later, Firefly has leveraged our EHR and technology-driven platform to build a modern, integrated healthcare tech stack that strengthens the physician-patient relationship. It’s no wonder that today, Firefly has improved the overall provider experience with Elation, delivering tools and workflows that empower physicians to closely manage care and patient panels.

Together, Firefly Health and Elation Health are transforming the trajectory of value-based care, and helping to chart a new course for healthcare.

 

Care team operations – the other half of member/patient engagement

Value-based care experts agree that technology is critical to improving and transforming patient engagement, both through patient-facing applications as well as care team-facing tools to facilitate backend operational workflows and ensure the best patient outcomes. “You cannot get ahead of potentially serious and costly issues if the referral to gastroenterology or dermatology is not completed in a timely manner, or abnormal results are not tracked,” says Nisha Basu, Medical Director, Firefly Health.

To realize its vision of delivering 2x improved patient outcomes at half the cost, Firefly leveraged the Elation clinical-first platform to build its own PRM (patient relationship management) tool, Lucian. Lucian is a centralized solution that pulls data from the Elation hosted database and Firefly’s own data warehouse to create a web-based app that helps care teams manage operational workflows. Lucian also feeds the member-facing mobile app, which takes patient engagement to the next level.

Through Lucian, Firefly can group patients into cohorts, and then use the clinical data to more effectively leverage member interactions. For example, member problem lists, billing ICD10 codes, and relevant discrete data and results from Elation are used to create hypertensive or diabetic member lists in Lucian, and automatically generate member-level tasks in Lucian to flag required follow-up. When care managers engage with the member, regardless of the purpose, they can maximize that time by reminding the member of their chronic disease follow-up care.

Similarly, Firefly builds member care plans in Lucian using clinical documentation that resides in Elation, facilitated by a proprietary algorithm. “The Elation EHR is the system of record for medical and clinical information. We then use the Elation integration platform, data from APIs or our data warehouse, to drive operational processes like scheduling, as well as care-focused processes, like member visits, communications, and interactions. Both approaches enhance our ability to cost-effectively manage our members’ health,” says Sarah Moravick, Vice President, Clinical Services & Operations at Firefly Health.

To build and enhance Lucian, Firefly meets regularly with the Elation team. “We have both technical and operational engagement with Elation, and we really appreciate that partnership, which is a meaningful and important value add, helping us stay focused on our projects, and moving things forward,” says Singh.

Interoperability and integration

The holistic view in Lucian allows Firefly care teams to not only maximize member engagement opportunities but also influence behaviors to increase value. Navigating members to preferred referral partners is essential to patient safety. Firefly has implemented workflows to ensure preferred specialists have all the data they need to evaluate the member, and that the findings are communicated back to Firefly in a timely manner. Care managers use referral worklists within Lucian to help navigate members to preferred providers, and then close-the-loop downstream.

A key component of those workflows is deep linking, maintained using Elation APIs, which allows care managers to quickly and easily view the Elation chart from a Lucian member profile to review clinical context, update data, or send a message to the PCP.

Firefly also plans to enable Elation’s chart sharing feature, which will provide more efficiencies and synergies with other practices in Elation’s network, one of the largest of its kind in the country. “We believe creating longitudinal transparency will have a positive impact on the clinical and operational teams by reducing the effort needed to obtain and share records, and also by facilitating collaboration across organizations. Patients want and expect their providers to communicate, but most EHRs make that difficult. We think this feature could be a game-changer for promoting cross-team collaboration and further advancing our member experience. We’re very excited to turn it on,” says Basu.

Another important integration is the ability for care team members to launch video visits directly from Lucian. Scheduling details, like member, provider, visit type, and appointment date and time are sync’d real-time from the EHR to Lucian through Elation’s webhooks and APIs. Care team members can then launch video visits directly from Lucian, improving workflow efficiency.

The tight pairing between Lucian and Elation is essential. Most of the care team’s operational workflows are managed through Lucian, requiring integration with and clinical data from Elation at many points within the app. And Firefly is always looking to enhance and improve that integration. “We have product roadmap insight with Elation, and have been sharing our suggestions on the Referral API. Our vision is to create referrals in Lucian, and use the API to write back to Elation. It’s refreshing to work with a healthcare technology partner that will engage with us at that level,” says Singh.

Like all of Elation’s enterprise partners, Firefly has full access to its clinical data from the Elation hosted database. The data is fed into their data warehouse, and used along with other Firefly data to populate dashboards that provide insights on chronic disease management, medication refills, TME (total medical expense), and more.

Member/patient engagement enhanced by technology

One of Firefly’s goals is to reimagine the primary care experience through technology that improves the member’s healthcare journey. Giving members more control over their healthcare activities, such as through self-scheduling options in the mobile app, is empowering to both the member and the care team. When members and their care teams engage and interact continuously, not just at yearly visits, there are more opportunities to influence behavior changes, and get ahead of potentially serious healthcare issues.

Firefly sees 25% of its members engage with them on a weekly basis. New members download the member app, and can start connecting with Firefly clinicians immediately. Through the app, members can Get Care which includes online chats with their care team along with functionality to submit referral requests, request refills, and self-schedule video visits, all according to their schedule and needs. Members can also view their Appointments, which are scheduled in Elation, and are populated in the member app through API integrations. Another key feature of the member mobile app is the Care Plan, built with clinical data from Elation, to provide a view of their long and short-term health goals.

The results speak for themselves. Firefly has industry-leading outcomes for member NPS scores, chronic disease management, and reducing TME.

Ongoing partnership to drive innovation

Firefly empowers members to thrive physically, mentally, and financially, and drives better health outcomes at lower costs through its member engagement approach, unique care model, and effective patient navigation. Technology and continued innovation are key to advancing those solutions. According to Mimi Liu, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Firefly Health, “A lot is evolving with value-based care, and technology can impede our mission. Together with Elation, we have made technology support our goals, and will continue leveraging the platform and partnership to fully deliver on our promise to our members.”
Lucian unifies the different aspects of Firefly’s care delivery model, using the Elation platform to help integrate its overall ecosystem. Together, Lucian and Elation support Firefly’s efforts to drive value through integrated patient and clinical experiences.

“Elation is no longer being perceived as “just” an EHR developer, but also a valuable technology partner in building and scaling our business solutions,” says Singh. We at Elation Health could not agree more.