Tracking a patient journey through integrated delivery networks (IDNs)

As integrated delivery networks (IDNs)—the conglomeration of hospitals and healthcare facilities into large, multi-site networks with centralized pharmacies—gather momentum, keeping track of which prescribers are affiliated with which health systems becomes an urgent goal for pharma market access teams. IDNs, in turn, have relationships with group purchasing organizations, prime-vendor wholesalers and other participants in pharmaceutical distribution, adding to the complexity.

To gain insights into this evolving marketplace, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a leading provider of customer master-data systems for healthcare providers, is leveraging a core offering, the Provider Data Masterfile, and related data assets as the Systems of Care (SoC). “SoC combines provider data with affiliation and medical claims data sets,” notes Theresa Greco, VP of Life Sciences at LexisNexis Health Care, a business unit of Risk Solutions. This combination provides life sciences clients “with requisite insight to navigate the IDN network of hospitals, medical groups, pharmacies and individuals by providing the quality data and advanced analytic insights to support both strategic initiatives and operational tactics.”

A case in point could be a patient whose care starts with a hospitalization, then goes to ambulatory care, and later to outpatient care, all within the same health system, but with different sites, different healthcare providers and possibly different prescriptions to be filled. (As it turns out, some IDNs have their own problems tracking such a patient journey even within their own network, because different components of the system use different recordkeeping systems.) Although SoC is not set up for tracking the individual patient, it does provide insight to how the elements of the IDN network link together.

Greco says that a select group of LexisNexis clients have been using the SoC service, which is now broadly available to all life sciences organizations.