Kristen Spaduzzi, the North Carolina Medical Society’s (NCMS) Director of Value-Based Health Care, attended the 4th Annual Move to Value Summit, presented by CHESS and held at the Wake Forest Biotech Place conference center Aug. 28-29. This is her report.
The Summit balanced “what is happening now in health care” with “where we are going in health care.”Every presentation encouraged us to think outside the box and to consider health care in a whole new light.  Below is a ‘highlight reel’ of what was presented:

  • Barbara Lennon, CHESS, demonstrated how accurate coding improves payment inefficiencies and provides insight into expected costs at the patient level, specifically by properly using Risk Adjustment and Hierarchical Condition Category payment models.
  • Kavita Patel, The Brookings Institution, provided a humorous look at the current political landscape in health care, from the President’s pressure on Congress to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to the Senate’s failure to pass any legislation. Dr. Patel stated the health care debate is not over, but expects the focus to shift to more bipartisan efforts to improve the failures of the ACA.
  • The NCMS’ Melanie Phelps and Centene’s Elizabeth Curran presented an overview of Medicaid in North Carolina, offering the timeline from passage of HB 372, the Medicaid reform bill, to implementing Medicaid managed care in 2019. The presentation highlighted Carolina Complete Health, which represents the partnership between the NCMS, the North Carolina Community Health Center Association and Centene.  Carolina Complete Health will bid for one of three statewide slots for a Medicaid managed care plan.
  • Crystal Run Healthcare’s Dr. Scott Hines spoke on the impact variations in care have on cost, quality of care and access. He presented a study by his organization that focused on one specialty group and the negative impact of variations in treating a specific diagnosis. Once the providers started communicating and aligning best practices, the negative impact was mitigated.
  • Michael Cousins, Ph.D., Lumeris, offered a tutorial on using predictive analytics to provide better quality patient care. He accentuated the usefulness of predictive analytics by showing the difference when a physician had access to the social determinants that prevented a patient from being compliant with their medication, i.e. costs, transportation, a nearby pharmacy.
  • Judy Murphy, IBM Global Healthcare, provided an eye-opening presentation on IBM’s Watson, a supercomputer that marries technology with humanity through cognitive processing. She shared how Watson is currently being used and the hopes for its future in health care.
  • Grace Terrell, Envision Genomics, provided a lesson in using genomics to improve quality of patient care at the individual patient level. Dr. Terrell gave an example of a boy dying from a rare disease. With genome-sequencing technology, however, the doctors were able to zero in on the exact mutation of cells causing the problem. This allowed them to implement the proper treatment plan. This case of precision medicine was described in the book One in a Billion.
  • Ed Hammond, Duke Center for Health Informatics, connected the dots between the technology available today, how it is used and how it is contributing to the technology of the near future with robotics and artificial intelligence paving the way to making humans irrelevant.