Can an AI Tool Report Encounters per Employer When Employer-Group Patients Are Tagged in Elation?

Can an AI tool report how many encounters each employer's members had?

Yes, if your employer-group patients are tagged in Elation, an AI tool can report how many encounters each employer's members had in a time period, and the most direct one comes from Elation itself. Elation Analyst is an AI-powered chat app that answers plain-English questions against your Elation Hosted Database, and Elation lists Appointments and Patient Tags among the data it is tuned for, so "how many appointments did patients tagged Acme Corp have last quarter" is the kind of question it is built to answer. Health Compiler takes a broader approach, pulling Elation data into employer dashboards that show utilization, cost and engagement trends for your employer clients. Without either, Elation's Patient List Report can filter by Patient Tag and export each employer's members to a spreadsheet you match against visits. Tabflows is not an analytics platform, so it fits around the report rather than producing it, keeping employer rosters current and making sure each report goes out on time.

Employer reporting is what turns a one-year pilot into a renewal, and encounter counts are usually the first number an employer or its broker asks for. The trouble is that the data lives in tools that were never built to talk to each other. The roster comes from the employer or a TPA, the membership sits in your billing platform, the visits sit in Elation and the messages sit in Spruce, so a simple count can eat an afternoon.

Step one is the tag, and Elation already has it

Elation's Patient Tags are classification labels you add to a patient's chart, shown under the patient's name and date of birth. Elation's help center says you can search for patients by their Patient Tags using the Patient List Report, and you can add, edit, merge and remove tags from the Patient Tags settings page. Merging and renaming update every chart that carries the tag, which helps when "Acme" and "Acme Corp" crept in as two tags.

For employer reporting the tag is the key that everything else hangs on. Use one tag per employer, spelled the same way every time, and add it during onboarding rather than later. When an employee leaves the plan, decide whether you remove the tag or keep it for historical reports, and write that rule down.

Three ways to count encounters per employer

Elation Analyst

Elation describes Elation Analyst as a self-service chat app that uses natural language to generate analytical reporting within your Hosted Database account, with results viewed in Snowflake. Elation says it is best at clear, data-based questions such as patient counts or appointment trends, and less suited to open-ended questions like "what trends do you notice". It is a beta feature available to a select number of practices using Elation's Hosted Database, so the first step is asking Elation whether your practice has access.

Elation's Patient List Report and a spreadsheet

Elation's Patient List Report finds patients who match criteria in their charts, including Patient Tags, and exports the list as an Excel-compatible spreadsheet. Run it once per employer tag, then match those patients against your visit list for the period. It works, it costs nothing extra, and it gets slow once you have more than a couple of employer contracts or the employer wants it monthly.

Health Compiler

Health Compiler's Elation partner page says its integration pulls clinical data from Elation, normalizes it and layers it with claims, pharmacy and engagement data for a longitudinal view of each patient and the panel. It lists employer analytics with auto-generated dashboards showing cost savings, utilization trends and engagement metrics "that your employer clients actually want to see," along with health outcomes tracking, MIPS and HEDIS reporting and HCC suspecting. Its integrations page also describes custom reporting and Direct Primary Care analytics built for clinics, TPAs, benefit advisors and employers. It is the strongest fit when employers expect claims and cost-savings data, not only visit counts.

• Elation Analyst. What it counts from: Hosted Database, incl. tags. Effort each period: Ask a question. Best for: Practices with Hosted Database access.
• Patient List Report. What it counts from: Tags, exported to a sheet. Effort each period: Manual matching. Best for: One or two employers.
• Health Compiler. What it counts from: Elation plus claims and engagement. Effort each period: Dashboards. Best for: Employers wanting cost and utilization data.
• Tabflows. What it counts from: Not an analytics tool. Effort each period: Owner and due date. Best for: The work around the report.

What HIPAA lets you share with an employer

HHS explains that the HIPAA Rules apply to covered entities and business associates, and not to employers in their capacity as employers. Your practice is a covered entity, and so is a group health plan the employer sponsors. Your patients' visit records are protected health information in your hands, which is why most practices don't hand an employer a list of which employees came in or why. The common, safer practice is to report aggregate, de-identified numbers, such as members enrolled, members seen and total encounters for the period, and to spell out in the employer contract exactly what you will report and how often.

Any vendor that touches the underlying patient data for you, whether an analytics partner or a task tool, needs a signed business associate agreement with your practice. Check that before the first report is built, and review the employer reporting terms with your counsel.

Where Tabflows fits

Tabflows is a dedicated tech team and smart admin infrastructure for DPC, concierge and private clinics. It works across the tools you already use, like Elation, Hint and Spruce, and turns the work between them into tracked tasks and automations. It is not an EHR, not a billing system and not an analytics platform, and it is not designed to bulk export or mine your Elation data, so for the encounter counts themselves Elation's reports or Health Compiler are the direct route.

Where Tabflows helps is the steady stream of small jobs that employer accounts add. The tech team can set up an employer roster sync that keeps employer-sponsored member rosters in Hint current from each employer's file, a weekly membership growth report from Hint, and a recurring task so each employer's quarterly report has an owner and a due date instead of living in someone's inbox. These are built on request for your clinic, and you can see them in the workflow automations directory. Our guide to selling direct primary care to employers covers what employers usually want in that report, and employer group enrollment tracking covers the steps between a signed contract and enrolled members.

A good next step

Start by checking that every employer-group patient carries exactly one consistent employer tag in Elation, because every option above depends on it. Then ask Elation whether you have Elation Analyst, and decide whether your employers want visit counts or cost data. If you'd like help with the work around employer accounts, tell us how your clinic runs and we'll point you to the setup that fits.

Sources: help.elationhealth.com/articles/adding-patient-tags, help.elationhealth.com/articles/find-patients-with-elations-patient-list, help.elationhealth.com/articles/Elation-Analyst, elationhealth.com/practice-success/technology/clinical-first-ai, elationhealth.com/resources/blogs/tuesday-tips-utilize-your-practice-list-report, healthcompiler.com/partners/elation, healthcompiler.com/integrations/elation-ehr and hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/workplace-wellness/index.html.