New York State Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP): Heading into Year 3

April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021

By Debbie Newsholme, MS, CHC, CCEP; Senior Director, Content Operations; HCCS, A HealthStream Company

On April 14, 2014 Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced that New York finalized terms and conditions with the federal government for a groundbreaking waiver that will allow the state to reinvest $8 billion in federal savings generated by Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) reforms.

The waiver amendment dollars will address critical issues throughout the state and allow for comprehensive reform through a Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program. The DSRIP program promotes community-level collaborations and focus on system reform, specifically a goal to achieve a 25 percent reduction in avoidable hospital use over five years. Safety net providers are required to collaborate to implement innovative projects focusing on system transformation, clinical improvement, and population health improvement. All DSRIP funds will be based on performance linked to achievement of project milestones.

There are 25 Performing Provider Systems in DSRIP. Having spent Year 1 and Year 2 getting infrastructure and project plans in place, it is time to start operationalizing all that work. April 1, 2017 marked the beginning of Year 3, and reporting now will be a major focus.

HealthStream, in collaboration with Iroquois Healthcare Alliance (IHA), has been involved in the DSRIP program since the beginning. We have developed DSRIP-specific training courses including DSRIP 101 and Health Literacy. In addition, we have assembled a vast library of online courses to help every PPS achieve the Workforce Development portion of the program. Recognizing that a PPS may need help with course assignments, we developed project-specific curricula based on widely-chosen project plans.

In addition, HealthStream developed the Initiative Management Dashboard (IMD) which gives managers and executives visibility into the execution of any key initiative. A PPS may have multiple hospitals, each having their own Learning Management System, in separate accounts. Generally, the PPS does not have access to each account to run separate reports, but HealthStream does. The IMD collects data from all of the separate Learning Management Systems and collates the data for the PPS into a single source of data. A general-purpose Initiative Management Dashboard includes visualizations about course completions, test scores, class registration, no shows, and evaluations. For DSRIP, and for one of the state’s larger Performing Provider Systems, we customized the IMD to the client's environment. Generally, an IMD collects and reports data from a single institution. However, this large PPS needed to span several client sites.

We built a report that had multiple tabs and reported on all courseware, all accounts, and all individual learners. It listed detail and summary information that could be filterable by client. This report gives the client greater insight into effectiveness and efficiency and allows the client to drill down graphically, starting at the summary section, all the way through client site, department, and job code, down to individual users.

The New York State DSRIP project is complex. HealthStream and IHA have developed tools to help a PPS achieve their commitment to the Workforce Development projects for which they are accountable. If you would like information on our products, or how we can assist your organization, please visit:

http://www.healthstream.com/collaboratives/iroquois-healthcare-association-dsrip/overview