Pegasystems Inc., the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, announced a partnership with MCG Health, the leader in evidence-based care guidelines, to enhance the care experience for patients with chronic conditions while enabling care management teams to achieve better patient outcomes. MCG’s industry-leading chronic care guidelines will be available within the Pega® Care Management Application, marking an industry-leading, direct integration of these guidelines with care management systems.
Management of chronic conditions — such as diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, and hypertension — benefits from evidence-based medical guidelines across the care continuum from short-term inpatient settings to outpatient, home, and community-based care settings. Currently, many healthcare payers (i.e. insurers) create and update their own care criteria for each scenario, which requires significant time and resources and are only available to care managers in PDF form. As a result, care managers must adjust patients’ care plans based on the associated provider’s guidelines using antiquated, paper-based methods. Additionally, care providers and payers typically work on separate systems, making it tedious and cumbersome to connect care guidelines with care management.
This integration between MCG and Pega will benefit care management teams in the following ways:
- Better health outcomes: The direct integration of chronic care guidelines in the Pega Care Management application makes it easier for the care delivery team (i.e. case managers, health coaches, providers, etc.) to assess patients’ needs against the newest industry standards from MCG. As a result, care management teams can quickly tailor care plans, ensuring optimized outcomes for patients with chronic conditions and complex needs.
- Improved digital processes: Rather than leveraging paper-based, PDF guidelines from external care plan databases and manually translating them to health assessment questions, tasks, and interventions, this integrated solution provides care managers with a direct connection to care guidelines through Pega Care Management. This creates a seamless experience to drive care planning directly from the assessments created by MCG in the same portal the care team uses to perform care planning activities.
“For the healthcare industry, keeping up with the latest research and care guidelines can be a challenge but also critical to ensure the highest quality outcomes for patients,” said Susan Taylor, vice president and business line leader, healthcare, Pegasystems. “This partnership with MCG represents a milestone for payers and providers. The ability to have instant access to industry-leading guidelines while maintaining a patient’s data in one application will transform the way they interact with and care for patients.”