Reporting and Analytics are Only Half the Story
by Janice Nicholson, Co-Founder, President & CEO, i2i Systems, Inc.
Twitter: @i2isystems
If you believe that Population Health Management is about reporting and analytics then you only know half the story. Yes, having the right Population Health Management tools eases the pain associated with delivering performance or compliance reports, demonstrating Meaningful Use and meeting Patient Centered Medical Home requirements. The right tools will also allow you to view and analyze data from targeted populations and compare your organization’s performance against others in your peer group.
That’s a good start, but it’s just the beginning, or what I call Population Health Management 1.0. In today’s complex, shifting healthcare landscape, much more is required to truly manage Population Health in fulfillment of the Triple Aim.
The next evolution of Population Health Management, what I refer to as Population Health 2.0, demands a greater focus on proactive care by the care team with fuller engagement from patients. As we shift to value-based care models, the care team needs to be able to interact with health record data in more intelligent ways that optimize care planning and improve health outcomes. In other words, they need to leverage data through the entire care cycle in ways that engage and activate patients to improve their health.
Population Health 2.0 means using critical information about each patient to automatically inform care teams before they see their patients. Before a clinic session begins, the care team should know about the high-risk patient with CHF, the chronically ill patient with asthma and the diabetic patient who has co-morbidities, weight gain since their last visit and is overdue for a check of their A1C levels.
Without ever having to query a system, Population Health 2.0 means delivering this information automatically to the care team so they can be fully prepared for each patient and deliver the highest quality of care.
In the past, I’ve talked about how analytics tools help you use your data to uncover new opportunities for care. By changing the way we interact with data, we can move beyond, or rather ahead, of measuring performance after the fact, toward using data to proactively drive the team’s performance at the point of care. That’s how we make a real impact on the health of each patient who comes through our doors.
By enabling care teams to interact more intelligently with data, members of the team can be utilized more efficiently, empowering them to work to their skill level. A medical assistant can support the team in ways that free up providers to practice medicine with greater impact. This model has the ability to lower costs and create efficiencies that will drive Population Health Management to new levels envisioned through the Triple Aim. It also enables practices to increase revenue and survive payment reform.
Integrating data, turning it into information and transforming that information into actionable insights that have the ability to improve the health of the patient and the practice is what we do at i2i Systems. This is the future of Population Health Management the way I see it.
This article was originally published on i2i Systems and is republished here with permission.