Turning Alignment into Action: How Smarter Payer-Provider Collaboration Drives Measurable Gains

Value-based care (VBC) was never meant to be a solo endeavor. Too often, health plans and providers approach shared goals like improving outcomes, reducing disparities, and lowering costs from opposite sides of the data divide. Despite parallel pressures to perform, the lack of real-time insight, bi-directional communication, and aligned infrastructure continues to limit the full potential of VBC. 

Nowhere is this tension more visible, or more solvable, than in Medicaid managed care. With complex member populations and high stakes for quality and equity, collaboration between payers and providers isn’t just beneficial, it’s foundational. 

Azara Healthcare is helping health plans and provider networks move beyond one-way data flows and episodic reporting toward true operational partnership. By embedding actionable insights into clinical workflows and connecting that intelligence back to payers in real time, Azara is transforming how both sides of the equation drive value. 

A New Era of Payer-Provider Collaboration

Azara’s Health Plan-Provider Market Report confirmed what many in the industry already knew: health plans and providers are more aligned in their priorities than ever before. The report revealed strong consensus around improving quality, enhancing risk adjustment, and enabling whole-person care. Yet that alignment often breaks down in execution, held back by delayed exchange of data, inconsistent attribution, and disconnected workflows. 

Azara’s technology addresses these challenges directly. By creating a shared source of timely clinical truth, our solutions allow both health plans and providers to view the same patient picture, take aligned action, and close the loop more effectively. This isn’t passive data integration—it’s high-touch, bi-directional exchange that drives clinical and financial results. 

What Real Collaboration Looks Like

Unlike many traditional data vendors, Azara’s tools are designed to embed directly into provider workflows. For example, care teams use Azara’s Patient Visit Planning (PVP) solution at the point of care to identify quality and care gaps, surface risk adjustment opportunities, and ensure more complete documentation during visits. This data is then shared with health plans in a certified, structured, validated format that supports more accurate reporting, improved population identification, and optimized quality performance. 

The impact of this collaboration is substantial. On average, practices that use the PVP regularly close 34% more care gaps than those that do not, reflecting how the use of real-time clinical data at the point of care drives measurable improvement in HEDIS^® and other quality measures.  

Similarly, practices using Azara’s EHR Plug-in were able to improve their risk recapture rate by 1.6%, giving plans more accurate population-level insights and better financial alignment under risk-sharing arrangements.  

Practices leveraging Azara Patient Outreach (APO) tools were 4 times more likely to engage attributed members who had not had an encounter for over a year—demonstrating the power of targeted engagement strategies built on timely, trusted data. 

A Value-Based Care Imperative

These improvements aren’t just technical wins—they’re critical levers in addressing some of Medicaid’s deepest challenges. Many MCOs operate in complex environments where access to social and clinical data is fragmented, and member churn is high. Azara’s solutions help mitigate these issues by ensuring health plans receive high-quality longitudinal data that fills the gaps left by claims alone. This is especially true for measures like hypertension control or diabetes A1C testing—areas where provider-sourced EHR data delivers the most value.  

This value is underscored by a recent analysis from the Indiana Primary Health Care Association and Capital Link, which found that patients covered by Medicaid and treated at community health centers incurred 24% lower costs compared to those in other care settings. For Medicaid health plans focused on reducing total cost of care while maintaining high-quality outcomes, these are not just impressive statistics—they’re proof points of a scalable strategy. 

More Than Data—A Shared Commitment 

Azara’s advantage isn’t just in what we deliver, it’s in how it’s used. The Azara DRVS platform is not a siloed repository or back-office system. It’s actively used by clinicians, quality and care teams every day. One Medicaid executive described DRVS as a “two-way fireplace,” where both payer and provider can see the same member needs and take action based on a shared understanding. That intimacy with the data—rooted in daily workflow integration—means Azara’s information is not only timely and accurate, but trusted and actionable. 

Our support and clinical transformation teams work directly with both clinical and IT leaders, ensuring alignment from data validation to performance improvement. This level of partnership enables faster implementation, integrated workflows, and ultimately, better outcomes for members. 

One Medicaid executive described DRVS as a “two-way fireplace,” where both payer and provider can see the same member needs and take action based on a shared understanding. That intimacy with the data—rooted in daily workflow integration—means Azara’s information is not only timely and accurate, but trusted and actionable.

Moving from Insight to Impact

If we want value-based care to reach its full potential, we need to stop treating payers and providers like separate teams and start acting like aligned partners. Azara makes that shift possible—by breaking down data silos, embedding insight into daily care, and creating the infrastructure for continuous collaboration. 

Whether you're a health plan looking to aggregate data across multiple EHRs, improve HEDIS performance, increase member engagement, or lower total cost of care, Azara offers more than just data and analytics. We provide a pathway to meaningful, measurable impact through our vast provider network and data ecosystem that spans 49 states. 

Explore what’s possible with Azara’s Health Plan Solutions or dive deeper into our reporting capabilities. The next chapter of healthcare transformation will be written by those who collaborate—and Azara is here to help lead the way.