Scaling Digital Health Solutions: A Conversation Series with TechSpring and Baystate Health

This month, Babyscripts sat down with our partners at Baystate Health and Techspring to talk about innovation in women’s health. This is part III of our conversation series, highlighting Baystate's vision for the future of Babyscripts at the health system, including integration with the EMR, incorporating the payer, and where they see innovation headed in women's health. 

[Read the first part of the conversation covering Baystate's funding journey, the second part including two patient case studies, and access the webinar here]

The future of Babyscripts at Baystate.

The success of the Babyscripts program has shown the value from the OB perspective, and the value of remote patient monitoring in general. It’s helped drive further conversations around the focus of Baystate and Techspring, and drive improved care models and care delivery.

Integrating with the EMR.

Although current enrollment and trigger reporting is working, the end goal for Baystate is to have a seamless integration with the EMR, partnering with Xealth to support integration with Cerner and enable providers to prescribe Babyscripts directly from the EMR, which will help scale the program. 

Incorporating the payor. 

Baystate is an integrated health provider, including insurance provider Health New England (HNE). They are now in conversations about joint deployments, wherein HNE will cover the costs of Babyscripts for their members. HNE also covers the BeHealthy Partnership for Medicaid. A joint deployment with HNE will enable Baystate to more effectively scale the Babyscripts service and deliver it to more people in the community.

Baystate has also been doing a lot of work with the provider billing office, finding commercial reimbursement through some of the commercial insurance plans that they work with.

It’s our feeling that the more we do in this space, the more we can demonstrate value, the more we can get those insurers who aren’t currently supporting it to support it, with hopes that in the future we won’t need outside or operational funding but can pay for this totally through reimbursement. Because health insurers recognize that this has tremendous value, both in the patient safety space but also economically. -Joe Diver

Leveraging new tools.  

As Baystate has rolled out the program to their patients, they’re excited for the future of the relationship with Babyscripts. They hope to leverage virtual care for blood sugar monitoring for gestational diabetes, an incredibly time and labor intensive process, and to address issues connected to maternal mental health. 

As a health organization and an obstetrical service (from an inpatient perspective), Baystate does 4200 deliveries a year. About half of those are done by a Baystate-owned practice, and half of them are private or community-based practices that are not owned or managed by Baystate. They have a different EMR, a different financial structure — from a Quality and Safety perspective, the most important thing is that all of these institutions are doing things in the same way. 

With recent HHS rules put in place to encourage collaboration and innovation between care providers, Baystate will have increased opportunities to provide virtual tools to affiliates and community physicians.

When we got this grant, I wondered, "What if we gave Babyscripts to every woman who is discharged from our L&D unit with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy?" Enrollment would not be based on practice, midwife or doctor — all that matters is that this patient gave birth at Baystate and when they leave the door, they’re given the tools that will keep them the most safe — which we think is the Babyscripts postpartum hypertension program. So that’s our goal — to roll it out to everybody. - Dr. Barker

More about Baystate Health

Baystate Health is a not-for-profit integrated health system headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts, serving Western Massachusetts and the Knowledge Corridor Region of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The system has 4 hospitals, over 80 medical practices, and 25 reference laboratories.