SeniorMetrix Inks Wash. Contract
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Nashville Business Journal – July 9, 2004
by Roy Moore
SeniorMetrix Inc. has moved into the Washington state market with a contract to provide predictive modeling and quality management for a Seattle-based HMO’s Medicare+ Choice enrollees.
The five-year-old Nashville company will provide documentation in hospital, skilled nursing facility and home health settings for 29,500 senior adults in the Pacific Northwest under its agreement with Group Health Cooperative, starting April 2005.

The agreement joins similar pacts with HMOs in California, Colorado, Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, where the company typically targets HMOs with 10,000 to 50,000 members.
SeniorMetrix last fall signed a similar deal with medical specialty practice GeriNet, covering Medicare+Choice enrollees in Southern California.
“For a health care company, the West coast a lot of times is a leader and the country looks for them as innovators,” says Rick Glanz, SeniorMetrix principal.
Certain variables – a patient’s chronic disease, the presence of two or more diseases in a patient and what kind of caregiver patients have available – can help health management organizations manage individual medical cases and predict the likely outcome of a medical treatment.
Armed with a database of more than 100,000 cases, Glanz says his company can normally save HMOs 15 to 20 percent in costs during the first year and should improve until reaching an optimal care threshold.
Tracking patient functional change and overall care can reduce practice variation and create better health outcomes, says Roxanne Dunne, manager of Group Health Cooperatives’ post-acute outcomes management services. Her nonprofit health care system and health plan serves more than 540,000 in Washington and Idaho.
SeniorMetrix’s service can be categorized within disease management, a fast-growing sector led by Nashville-based American Healthways. Proponents say measuring outcomes can result in improved outcomes and save companies on health care costs.
The Washington deal boosts its service offering to more than 600,000 Medicare+Choice enrollees, compared with roughly 400,000 last year.
