Over the past few years, Sun Life Health has been on a mission to improve patient care while easing the operational burdens on our IT team. As a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) serving nearly 50,000 patients across 12 locations in Pinal and Maricopa counties, Arizona, we needed a better way to close gaps in care while more easily sharing data between our dozens of medical providers and the many payers we work with.
To achieve this, we turned to healow Insights and it has truly transformed how we work.
Tackling Care Gaps and Improving Population Health
When we first started exploring ways to impact our patient population, we focused on improving key metrics like care gaps and cancer screenings. As my colleague and Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Willms, DO, puts it, healow Insights gives us a snapshot for what is needed with each patient, what gaps in care exist, and how we can actively address those gaps during the visit.
Now, when our medical assistants do pre-visit planning, they know what to look for with each patient. This comprehensive visibility into patient data has helped our clinical teams proactively close care gaps, leading to a dramatic increase in comprehensive preventive care visits.
Preventive care matters for every practice, but for Sun Life Health, it is critical. As a Federally Qualified Health Center, we see patients from every walk of life. We offer primary care, pediatrics, OB/GYN, dentistry, integrated behavioral health, and many other services. Delivering quality care to a large and diverse population becomes significantly more manageable when you have the kind of data that healow Insights provides. It’s right in the name of the service, after all — insights — and that is truly key for us.
Dramatic Growth in Wellness Visits and Incentive Revenue
One of the most tangible results we saw was the jump in annual wellness visits — from around 700 visits to over 4,000 in just two years. These visits are important because they improve the quality of care for the patient and they come with financial incentives.
From a revenue perspective, the numbers speak for themselves. We grew our incentive revenue from $400,000 to $1.3 million in the first year after implementing healow Insights. And by last year, we had increased that number further, to over $2 million.
Each year, we continue to capture more of these healthcare incentive revenues by improving our care delivery and documentation. In addition, we are actively working toward higher Star Ratings, which can unlock even more incentive dollars at the end of each year. healow Insights helps us to ensure that providers and payors remain in close collaboration, helping us achieve these incentive goals.
Streamlining IT Operations and Securing Data Sharing
From an IT standpoint, one of the biggest challenges we faced was managing payor audits. Traditionally, health plans required direct login access to our systems to perform their audits, which posed security risks and added significant workload to our IT team.
With healow Insights, that changed completely. The platform allows health plans to securely pull discrete data they need for audits — without ever needing direct login access to our EHR system.
This capability has been a game-changer for us. We’re able to submit discrete data to the health plans, and all the information flows without our team having to touch it. We can go in and review the information and see who took what and when. You get a nice graph of how many charts were pulled, when they were pulled, and who hasn’t pulled charts. So, you’re able to review that directly within the system.
This not only improves our IT efficiency but also enhances our compliance and data security posture — a win-win all around.
The Bigger Picture: Supporting Value-Based Care
If healow Insights did all this and nothing more, it would be an amazing story for us. But healow Insights has done even more. It has been instrumental in helping us advance our Value-Based Care initiatives by improving payor-provider interoperability and facilitating timely, accurate data exchange.
Turning data into actionable insights has been a pivotal part of our success, allowing us to focus on what matters most — delivering high-quality care and closing care gaps. Because with healow Insights, we’re not just managing data — we’re using it to improve the lives of our patients and sustainably grow our practice, building a bright healthcare future for the communities we serve.