Kindred Goes Big on Data with Inovalon, Avalere

In a health care environment riddled with newly introduced value-based payment models, Kindred Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE: KND), the nation’s largest home health provider, is setting out to improve clinical outcomes and ensure more coordinated care through better data use and analytics.

Louisville-based Kindred has entered a multi-year agreement with Inovalon (Nasdaq: INOV), a technology company that provides cloud-based analytics and data-driven platforms to the health care industry, and its subsidiary Avalere Health, the companies announced Thursday. The partnership aims to bring data, analytics and health care platforms together to enhance clinical quality outcomes, utilization and financial performance in post-acute settings.

“The idea is to create the intelligence to ensure that the right referral happens and that the care is being provided at the right cost,” Avalere’s President Dan Mendelson tells Home Health Care News.

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Under the partnership, Inovalon and Avalere will contribute clinical and cost data on 127 million Americans and combine it with data specific to Kindred to create formulas that predict how a person will do in different care settings. Kindred will then use the results to determine patient placement and operational strategies.

“Kindred is committed to bringing the industry’s leading post-acute care solutions to the marketplace,” President and CEO Ben Breier said in a statement. “We believe that leveraging data, advanced analytics and real-time decision support platforms is key to delivering on this focus. We are pleased to be working with the combined capabilities of Inovalon and Avalere as our partners, and look forward to these capabilities supporting Kindred’s differentiation for this important segment of the health care market.”

If someone is discharged from the hospital with a hip fracture, for example, he or she may have different post-acute needs than a patient with the same ailment, Mendelson says. Whereas some patients need intensive rehab after such an incident, others might require skilled nursing while still others could use professional home care services. Kindred will use the data solutions configured through this partnership to figure out care plans that are best for each patient in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.

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The partnership proves especially important for Kindred, because the company has been reconfiguring itself to offer all of these different types of care settings. For example, it shed more than 150 skilled nursing facilities and long-term acute care hospitals and purchased Gentiva to beef up its home health offerings.

“Our expectation is that this will be able to expedite getting people home appropriately,” Mendelson says.

Written by Kourtney Liepelt

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