Care Convergence: Contessa’s One-of-a-Kind Healthcare Technology Platform

1. When Contessa developed the integrated home care platform, we wanted a modern perspective to be threaded through every aspect of the organization. We knew that a technology platform that could adequately support our patients and various partners was a must. Upon investigation, however, we didn’t find one sophisticated enough to meet the needs of patients undergoing care both in the hospital setting and, eventually, at home. So, we went to work to build one ourselves. 

The Basics of  Care Convergence

Today, the result of that work is Contessa’s proprietary technology platform, Care Convergence, which consists of three main “pillars”: 

• Knowledge, which includes claims data analytics and episodic data from the patients we serve across the organization; 
• Tracker, which is the care management piece of the platform, allowing our teams to coordinate care with ease; 
• And Exchange, which is our revenue cycle and insurance claims management system. 

These areas within the platform help our teams manage care at an episodic level, rather than simply one point in time, all while accounting for unique market-by-market variations. Care Convergence helps Contessa team members and our clinical partners provide care coordination upfront, in the same way a hospital does, while allowing for monitoring over the continuum of the episode. The platform empowers us to capture data as we deliver care with minimal added work. 

In addition to oversight, Care Convergence supports the development of customized care plans and coordination with key vendors like medical equipment providers, lab technologists, and staff orchestrating follow-up appointments. The platform generates tasks and activities required for each patient that can be marked upon completion by nurses and care teams. Since many different providers are often involved in each patient’s care, Care Convergence captures the full picture without platform limitations, more easily enabling collaboration. 

Key Differentiators 

Care Convergence is different from other technology platforms in that it is holistic. Electronic medical records (EMRs) don’t always carry over seamlessly when care is delivered through providers at different hospitals and health systems. Care Convergence captures the full picture of a patient’s status and diagnoses without platform limitations. 

Each of Care Convergence’s three pillars serves a unique need. Knowledge offers proprietary patient data that helps our team make improvements to our model and the delivery in which we serve patients. Tracker enables a more integrated care management process, allowing for increased communication between the many providers involved in one patient’s care. Exchange drives a highly efficient revenue cycle management process with our health plan partners 

The platform is a highly configurable system, meaning that features can be built once, then customized limitlessly. This allows for a more personalized touch and less development time from partner-to-partner, meaning a unique approach by market and significantly reduced speed to launch. 

Additionally, in the care delivery process, Care Convergence allows for customized care plans based on disease state and program to be developed. These can include not only the types of care provided, but also things like vendor affiliates and the call cadence patients receive from our team, which can have variance in regulatory standards. 

Revolutionary and Evolutionary 

We are also taking proactive measures to ensure that Care Convergence stays ahead of the curve. From a functional perspective, we add features on a regular basis through an iterative development process that adjusts for growth and scale. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, our teams adapted our model and platform to serve more patients at home. Incremental development work is also being completed, streamlining the platform as Contessa grows and adopts new service lines like palliative care and skilled nursing. 

With the growth of the organization has come more partners and complexity to the Care Convergence platform. We are constantly innovating and iterating to ensure that the right third-party tools are leveraged, information is liaised through the platform properly, and the ways in which we identify eligible patients remain accurate. With the help of data trending, Care Convergence helps providers understand our patients’ program eligibility and the opportunity we have at each provider location to support more patients. 

Down the line, we envision an app for Care Convergence that can be used by both provider teams and patients. We aim to continue reducing the administrative burden our teams face and make our care delivery process both less complex and more technologically sophisticated. 

Along with the evidence-based best practices our team delivers daily, Care Convergence is supporting the integrated care at home experience by helping achieve lower overall costs, increased dialogue between care teams, and improved outcomes. Given how far the platform has come in just a few years, we are eager to continue sharpening the platform to serve an even wider variety of healthcare needs.