Common patient records can help make value-based care work | Viewpoint

Your clinicians are burned out. Your support staff are swamped. And the list of job openings on your health system’s website drags on for pages.

With a projected shortage of 100,000 healthcare workers by 2028, it’s not a question of if the strain will hit but how your system will deliver the value-based care your patients deserve.

Having a common patient record (CPR) can help. When everyone is literally reading from the same sheet of (virtual) paper, in real time, processes become smoother, duplication disappears, and your team gets hours back in their days. Patients get better outcomes, and you get budget relief.

Here’s why a CPR is the single most impactful operational shift you could make to slash costs, reduce burnout, and actually make value-based care work.

How a CPR can slash costs

Not all healthcare organizations are sharing their data, despite being required by law. In fact, our analysis shows that 40 percent of data isn’t shared as it should be. This siloing drives waste and unnecessary spending.

For example: Let’s say that a patient visited an out-of-network ER last week and got labs done, then sees their PCP today. The PCP, flying blind, orders the same tests again. The patient gets stuck with a needle twice and you eat the cost of the unnecessary tests.

Interoperability also slashes costs in other ways, like reducing manual data entry. Less busywork means lower labor costs.

How a CPR heals clinician burnout

Providers spend way too much time hunting for information and completing energy-draining administrative work.

A CPR enables seamless collaboration without requiring physicians to be in the same system. Think of all the “Marco Polo-ing” that goes on as doctors across institutional lines try to communicate on a case.

Through CPR visibility, a staff member from a dermatologist’s office may follow up with a patient about a new medication. The patient’s PCP can see that this follow-up happened and know they don’t also have to call the patient.

AI tools can unlock even more opportunities to save time, but only if they’re layered on top of a CPR.

When AI agents are pointed at a single provider’s record, that agent is processing a piece of the patient’s story, while thinking it’s processing all of it. Mistakes happen, and distrust ensues.

If the AI agent is working with a CPR, it has access to the whole picture, and it’s less likely to get things wrong. This allows providers to spend less time reviewing records and more time on patient-facing care.

Less paperwork, fewer headaches, more time for actual care. That’s how you chip away at burnout and let clinicians do the meaningful work that inspired them to get into medicine in the first place.

How a CPR can enable value-based care

Today, most of the money in value-based care is in risk adjustment, even though most of the potential is in care management. Risk adjustment starts with claims analysis (the closest thing we have to the patient’s whole picture before the arrival of the CPR!).

But that claim file is delayed (usually 60 days after care) and isn't attached to the info you need to defend a risk adjustment. Now you need to “go to the faxes” to prove it. That’s not the case if you use a CPR.

Claims files are also useless for managing care. When the starting gun goes off 60 days after the care takes place, you have very little chance of changing how that care was delivered!

Whereas, if you use a CPR and see a live update on an admission for your patient, you have an opportunity to influence their treatment.

Value-based care depends on seeing the full patient picture in real time. Without a CPR, you’re stuck with fragmented, outdated data that derails proactive care.

On a larger scale, shared data exposes trends. For example, you may notice an uptick in chicken pox diagnoses in young patients. Your pediatricians can proactively share information about prevention with the parents of young children in an effort to curb outbreaks.

A CPR gives providers the context they need to act quickly and intelligently. Patients get better care, sooner.

A CPR benefits providers and patients

A CPR does more than just save overworked providers time; it’s groundwork for a breakthrough for patients.

Today, patients see a slice of their records in each of their doctors’ patient-facing portals. That’s a lot of logging in and transcribing if you want to know your whole picture.

And once you do know your whole picture, there is no way to feed it into your own resources — a personal agent, an Oura Ring, a diet app, etc.

A CPR kills BOTH the fragmentation but also the delivery problem. A good CPR could be the single strongest force in enabling the democratization of medical information to the public.

Free the data, and you free up clinicians’ time to focus on meaningful care work. But you also empower patients to take control over their own health.

CPR isn’t just a tech upgrade. It’s an operational shift that benefits providers and patients alike. Enact it, and you’ll see the payoff — in your margins, in your workforce, and in your patient outcomes.

Jonathan Bush is founder and CEO of Zus Health.