Value-based care: From transactions to relationships

Will Stillinger has been the Chief Operating Officer of Your Health – a primary care practice and pharmacy serving South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia – since 2012. Your Health is dedicated to providing patients with flexible healthcare solutions – including in-home, in-office, and telehealth visits – and exceptional value-based care (VBC).

Your Health takes proactive, personalized approaches to their patient care, with a focus on increasing clinical outcomes while decreasing risk and cost.

According to Stillinger, VBC is the way the world needs to move, and the rewards are exponential. Beyond the benefits of coordinated care and reduced healthcare costs, Stillinger views the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care at a more fundamental level. He sees VBC as reframing patient care from transactional to relational, which makes both providers and patients happier. In a VBC model, clinicians and practices are incentivized to care about clinical outcomes, which leads to higher quality and more personalized care for patients.

Stillinger recognizes that moving from fee-for-service (FFS) to value-based care (VBC) can be tricky. Regardless, he encourages everyone to go down that path.

athenahealth, he says, makes it very easy.

Data: the not-so-secret ingredient to VBC success

For a clinician to treat a patient holistically, they need to understand what’s happening with their patients outside their four walls. In an ideal world of interoperability and health information exchange, not only do providers have all the relevant clinical information recorded from other care settings, but that information is also organized, analyzed, and presented in a digestible way.

This is where, according to Stillinger, athenahealth presents a uniquely modern solution that transforms data into actionable insights.

He speaks to how the relationship athenahealth has with payers allows providers to have more control over the insights they’re being held accountable for. Delivering insights from payers at the point of care empowers providers to treat patients holistically and more easily understand the risks they’re held accountable for addressing. Stillinger says that bringing in payer data, “makes a provider more inquisitive” about “how can I improve this patient’s quality of life, as opposed to treating them for the flu or whatever they came in for.”

Data visualization is also important to give providers large amounts of data that they can digest at-a-glance. Your Health believes so firmly in the value of this information that they purchased the athenaOne® Data View product as well, which Stillinger says allows them to always put the right data in front of the right provider at the right time.

“The trending in the patient chart for certain lab results and gaps in care is brilliant,” Stillinger says of the athenaOne® clinical workflows designed to surface care and diagnosis gaps. “Because a lot of providers can look at numbers, but once you put it on a graph and put some colors to it, people look at it differently.”

Better data leads to better clinical decisions, and ultimately better patient outcomes – the core to value-based care success.

Happier providers and healthier patients

Using athenaOne, providers can find data insights from quality program metrics to risk scores to trend reporting that allows them to make informed clinical decisions at the point of care. Stillinger says this is the special ingredient to empowering providers at Your Health to own their success in VBC.

Your Health acquired a clinic in 2024 where, previously, providers were unhappy and burnt out working 40–60-hour weeks in a transactional fee-for-service model. When they moved onto athenaOne, and into Your Health’s value-based care model, these same clinicians found themselves equipped with a world of digestible, insightful reports to shift their mentality about delivering care.

“With all that data, they started asking more questions and engaging patients more, because they’re being treated as a full patient with all this history as opposed to someone just coming in with a cold,” Stillinger said.

Now, not only are patients at this clinic receiving more holistic care, but their internal provider happiness score has doubled, Stillinger says, a metric that helps them retain staff, reduce turnover, and deepen relationships with patients for greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Unlock the ingredients to embed value into care

Get in touch to learn more about athenaOne and see how the power of holistic data at your fingertips can deliver insights at the point of care to enable providers to treat patients holistically.