GSI Health
Powering the Future of Healthcare

“While we cannot guarantee a world free of health issues, we can work toward a world in which the care everyone receives is optimized,” says LeRoy Jones, Founder, President and CEO of GSI Health, a Philadelphia, PA-based company. With expertise spanning decades, Jones leads a team of innovators that is driving healthcare IT reform and has a history of developing the health information exchange architecture and standards that are shaping the future of healthcare IT.

One of the greatest transitions facing the healthcare industry today, says Jones, is the shift to value-based care in which organizations are paid not for the services they provide, but for keeping a patient healthy. GSI Health embraced this transition very early—well before the vast majority of health IT providers, pioneering a software platform built specifically to support value-based care and integrated care teams. “Our solution combines care management and analytics to bring insights closer to those who are delivering care, empowering those caregivers to make decisions about how best to spend their time and resources to impact patient health,” says Jones. Today, GSI Health is an industry leader in population health management solutions, developing working models for effective collaboration in community-based care delivery.

Pioneering Value-Based Care

The company’s core product—the GSIHealthCoordinator platform—is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based solution that integrates and analyzes data from across the community, providing a complete picture of not only a patient’s medical issues, but also the behavioral and socioeconomic issues that can affect care. The key enabler here is the platform’s interoperability—enabling data to be integrated from a variety of data sources across the care continuum, including Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and other clinical, social service, and administrative systems, public and private Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), and claims systems. This interoperability removes boundaries to care, enabling information exchange and transparency outside the walls of any single organization. “We enable our customers to analyze data from all their partners in a single platform to develop the insights they need to work more efficiently and to improve results,” says Jones.

Interoperability, however, is only part of the solution. Jones says that while most players in the industry believe in measuring outcomes, GSI Health focuses on measuring processes along with outcomes. “It’s not enough to share data and develop insights—you need to infuse those insights into the daily work of caring for patients,” says Jones. GSI Health’s innovative approach is to combine interoperability with analytics and care coordination so that lessons learned can be flowed from analytics and translated into something useful and actionable to improve patient health.

It's not enough to share data and develop insights—you need to infuse those insights into the daily work of caring for patients

The platform melds the diverse and fragmented data from various systems with the care management regimen of the care team into a single comprehensive care plan, providing a 360-degree, longitudinal view that enables care teams to address complex patient issues and the non-medical factors impacting care, and reduce unnecessary hospital and Emergency Department (ED) utilization. Robust analytics provide insights that enable care teams to proactively address gaps in patient care, allocate scarce resources, and strategically identify at-risk patients in time for cost-effective interventions. “We provide an enabling technology that helps organizations move beyond simply documenting information to using the information to understand their patients so they can deliver more effective care and improve their outcomes,” says Jones. This model of delivering care based on complete information, learning from it, and implementing improvements is the foundation of successful population health management, and creates a model that can be replicated across programs.

Collaborating to Enable Whole-Person Care

Treating the whole person rather than treating a disease—particularly for patients with chronic diseases and comorbid conditions—requires a new level of care, driven by entire communities who “touch” the patient, rather than just the doctors and nurses delivering medical care. It truly “takes a village” to treat these more vulnerable patients—multiple types of providers, including an entire range of social services in addition to medical and behavior health, must come together to make sure the entirety of a patient’s needs is addressed. This is where GSI Health excels. “We believe that getting the right information into the right hands in a way that can be leveraged into action can have a tremendous benefit for healthcare,” says Jones. “Our solution enables disparate care providers to efficiently come together to produce the best outcomes for their shared patients, promoting shared experience and responsibility and reducing risk.”

GSI Health’s impact on the healthcare industry is exemplified by its first client, Maimonides Medical Center, a non-profit, non-sectarian hospital located in Borough Park in Brooklyn, NY, who applied the company’s platform to a targeted patient population with severe mental illness and behavioral health diagnoses. GSI Health worked hand-in-hand with Maimonides Medical Center to advance their value-based care program, helping them develop consensus on the workflow of their care model with their partner organizations, unite different medical, behavioral, and socioeconomic providers to meet their population’s needs, and integrate different data sources to provide insight and information transparency across the care continuum.

GSI Health’s platform was configured as the lynchpin to enable different organizations to collaborate and use care management to orchestrate patient care across different providers and settings. This partnership not only enabled Maimonides to support the early stages of a collaborative network of disparate providers while at the vanguard of the value-based care movement, but helped the organization understand how its broader networks of providers were using it, monitor compliance, and analyze the results of its new model of care. Maimonides Medical Center made various changes to hone its workflow that brought about measurable improvement in outcomes—including a reduction in hospitalizations of 30 percent. According to Dr. David Cohen, EVP, Clinical Affairs and Affiliations, Chair, Population Health Management at Maimonides Medical Center, “GSI Health has been a true partner. They’ve provided essential care coordination tools to integrate the care of our patients across medical, behavioral health, and social services— ultimately improving our outcomes.” Today, GSI Health supports numerous programs for Maimonides Medical Center beyond the initial program, and has an expansive client base across the country.

"Our solution combines care management and analytics to bring insights closer to those who are delivering care, empowering those caregivers to make decisions about how best to spend their time and resources to impact patient health"

Dedication to Continuous Innovation

GSI Health’s innovation around collaborative care and care-delivery optimization is enabling providers to assume more risk for managing their populations and meet the challenges of moving to value-based care models. The company is driving automated decision support activities, moving beyond measuring outcomes and providing insights to prescribe activities that will drive better outcomes. GSI Health also heavily invests in interoperability, not just at the data level but between user interactions and different systems. “We mitigate risk by fitting in with existing systems and workflows rather than dictating one of our own,” says Jones. “This creates a seamless experience that minimizes disruption, keeping users efficient and effective.”

GSI Health solution is being rapidly accepted in the marketplace. GSI Health is the most utilized population health management solution in New York State for its Medicaid population, where more Medicaid Health Homes use GSIHealthCoordinator than any other care management solution—supporting at least one out of every five Medicaid beneficiaries. GSI Health has expanded to support nearly 10,000 providers across the U.S.

The company, with its innovative platform, is ensuring a future where data-driven technology will optimize overall care delivery, improving the health of entire populations, and solving the problem of uncoordinated, under-informed healthcare being practiced today. To achieve this, Jones takes a unique approach, “We strive to play chess when the rest of the industry is playing checkers. This strategy enables us to think several steps ahead and plan actions that will impact not just tomorrow, but the day after and next year. This kind of perspective allows us to stay ahead of competitors and prepare ourselves for the next step.”