The healthcare industry is all set to achieve what’s called ‘The Triple Aim’– a better experience of patient care, improved health of populations, more affordable care. And population health management (PHM) programs are gaining momentum rapidly to make it happen. But, the technological aspect of it is still catching up – we have some distance to go before understanding what we need to build mature PHM systems.
Here’s what we already know
As part of our efforts to deliver value to clients, we’ve dedicated our resources for developing knowledge in the PHM space, and gained ample insight. For example, we’ve learnt that EHR technology is merely one IT tool in the overall portfolio of solutions needed to support PHM. Or, that before identifying required IT solutions for deploying PHM, it’s better to first understand the core process building blocks of an organization’s strategy for it.
What are we doing with our knowledge base?
Through our healthcare technology experiences and investment in honing our skills continuously, we’ve now developed a framework to help providers match their operational needs to available capabilities. This helps kickstart an enterprise’s PHM initiative. It has four core building blocks:
- EHR, a key capability for providers to deliver care across the continuum.
- Infrastructure for data sharing, collaboration, and engagement with providers and patients.
- Care Management,enabling a coordinator’s ability to engage in outreach, and ensure that patients are compliant with care plans designed to improve overall health status.
- Analytics,for leveraging data to assess and stratify the population, identifying where to focus care coordinators, and measuring overall population health.
Having mapped these building blocks, we recognize that two of them are foundational to PHM – EHR and Infrastructure. Capabilities within these two building blocks need to be strong, for any organization seeking to manage populations effectively. The other two are enabling of PHM, which means they help an organization’s initiatives move to more mature levels.
Wondering how our framework works for organizations?
It provides a mechanism to:
- Establish a common language across the organization around value-based care delivery.
- Develop system-wide data governance to support reporting and analytics.
- Agree on guiding principles and requirements for process, functional, and data needs, to accelerate IT solution evaluation and selection.
- Facilitate meaningful discussions related to operational and IT issues with the executive leadership.
If you’d like to experience firsthand how this framework benefits our partners, come work with us. Contribute to our knowledge base, and help PHM programs mature. Apply at emids careers.
