Reward Health Sciences, Inc. is dedicated to improving health care by partnering with physicians, hospitals, health plans and government leaders to provide analytic innovations to enable population health and risk contracting.
Originally founded by Richard E. Ward, MD, MBA in 1999, Reward Health Sciences, Inc. has worked with multi-specialty physician group practices, integrated delivery systems, academic medical centers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and health plans. These engagements involved the development of evidence-based practice guidelines and protocols, the development of analytic databases, the study of treatment effectiveness and provider performance, and the application of clinical information technology to improve clinical processes.
From 2006 through 2010, Dr. Ward served as Vice President for Clinical Programs and Medical Informatics for a large health plan, where he worked to grow a provider partnership program involving three dozen physician organizations, develop more than 40 clinical practice improvement initiatives, launch the nation’s largest Patient-Centered Medical Home program, and design an incentive framework to support the development of Accountable Care Organizations (“organized systems of care”). During this period, Dr. Ward also worked with a number of sophisticated physician organizations to implement provider-based care management programs to increase patients’ effectiveness in chronic condition self-management and to coordinate transitions of care from acute to ambulatory settings to reduce readmissions. Dr. Ward also collaborated with others on a number of competitively-funded university-based research projects to rigorously assess these pay-for-performance, patient-centered medical home, and provider-based care management programs.
In February, 2011, Dr. Ward re-launched Reward Health, dedicated to working with physicians and hospitals to transform care processes to achieve the vision of “Accountable Care”, where provider organizations in a local community take responsibility for the health and wellness of a defined population. Accountable Care Organizations allow providers to work together to create more effective, proactive, patient-centered care processes that deliver measurably superior quality of care, health outcomes, and patient satisfaction at a substantially lower cost trend.
The reimbursement changes and associated incentives in the health care reform legislation, together with the increasing consensus within the health care community on the vision of patient-centered and accountable care, are driving many health care leaders in communities across the country to come come together to shape their own future, creating new models of collaboration, serving their local populations more effectively while ensuring that the change is sustainable to health care providers. This transformation will require new types of organizations, new data resources, new processes of care, and new ways to measure and equitably share the gains that will be achieved. Success requires the ability to synthesize ideas and methods from multiple disciplines, including medical science, lean thinking, information technology, medical informatics, financial analysis, epidemiology, and biostatistics.
Reward Health Sciences stands ready to help — to partner with health care leaders to bring these disciplines to bear on the work being done to transform our health care system town by town, region by region.
Reward Health Sciences is not a large firm. If you need an army of consultants, we’re not your best choice. We’re looking to partner with organizations that have existing capabilities and are committed to further developing their own internal capabilities. We have the experience to know what needs to be done, and the values to focus on helping you accomplish your goals to improve the health and wellness of your patient population.
We invite you to contact us to start a conversation about what you are working to accomplish, and how we might be helpful.