The healthcare industry is making a shift towards value-based care – no more fee-for-service payments, no hoops to jump through to get the right care at the right time. Now, it is all about quality care, at reduced costs, for individuals, and entire patient groups. How? By filling gaps in care, and moving from reactive treatment to sustained wellness. That’s the goal of population health management (PHM).
Why this reorientation?
The U.S. spends more on healthcare, yet has a lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes than any other high-income nation. Thus, there is dissatisfaction amongst patients, and a higher need for accountability from providers and clinicians. Population health management helps address both these, and empowers patients to manage their own health.
Before you deploy a PHM program, here’s something to know:
From our dedicated exploration of the PHM space, we’ve learnt that deploying a population health management program requires a new way of thinking and executing the daily tasks of patient care. Organizations need to cultivate innovative skill sets – care coordination, team-based approaches to distributing workloads, familiarity with data analytics and governance, and quality reporting. At the heart of this all – IT solutions and data.
As a global leader in healthcare technology, we know that PHM requires data capture and analysis in each aspect of care delivery. We’re also aware that value-based care is still nascent. There is no single IT solution that can take care of all the needs of a PHM program – needs like advanced analytics, data sharing, and exchange with external entities and telehealth. Some of these can be managed in-house. But some need to be outsourced, thus compounding technological complexity. The upside of this – ample opportunities for healthcare IT professionals to innovate and lead change from within.
What do you need to launch your own PHM program?
We recommend that organizations who want to deploy PHM programs, ask yourselves the following questions right at the start line:
- Who are your payer partners for risk-based contracting? What arrangements do you have with them?
- Which other provider organizations are you aligning with?
- How will you capture data needed for quality/ performance measures that define program success?
- What is your strategy to expand population health from at-risk patients to the entire patient group?
Each organization will approach PHM in its own way. And we at emids are here to be trusted partners to make that transition easy. If you are keen on making population health management a reality for millions of people around the world, work with us. Apply at emids careers, a team that is making healthcare better.
