Most of the time, Health IT spawns artificial concepts – born as a result of relentless media hype, each reaches a precocious peak of publicity and then quickly fades away. Buzzwords like RHIO, NHIN, PHR, Chronic Disease Management, etc. were all touted as game changing at one point or other in the past. Now it’s more about patient engagement, HIE, Analytics, Care Collaboration. One stands out in my mind though – Population Health Management (PHM). I think that even though it may be riding the hype cycle like all others, it has signs of legitimacy.
Think of it this way. For decades, we have endured and participated in a healthcare system that is geared towards encounter-based medicine. Patient comes in with complaint X, gets treated and billed for complaint X. Now with changing payment models though, it is important for the payers and providers to broaden their perspective. They need to keep track of patient (member) over a period of time, and keep them out of hospitals/ERs. As a result they need a “Longitudinal Health Record” that spans across encounters. This is what HIEs promise to provide and interoperability standards promise to enable.
From a Health IT vendor perspective, PHM means tools that help user do two things:
But the devil is in the details, of course. One can argue why EHRs, the perennial stolid incumbents of health IT world, don’t have this as native capability. The answer is clear if you’ve ever used an EHR. They were (and are) built as transactional systems that focus on the current visit billing and documentation. Doing a parallel meta-analysis of how this patient fits into a population profile and what they need outside the context of this visit is a humungous leap for almost all EHRs. And that is why a new crop of startups have started to focus on this niche.
AmplifyHealth says all the right things on it’s website. They point out the need for finding patients that are going off-track. Like most startups, it avoids putting a live demo video on the site (so frustrating) so I’m going off of what the webpages claim as capabilities. The three areas they speak of:
- Patient Management: Seems like this provides ability to create custom lists, akin to registries. That is a valid value-add, aligned with actionable analytics as described above. But the website description veers off into “engage new patients, influence productive behavior, establish relationship” which is confusing. All those belong to the foundational practice management and EHR system.
- Measuring Outcomes: This would be the ‘meta-analysis’ that doesn’t come native with EHRs. Tracking outcomes based on measures is just starting to get engrained into the EHR DNA, thanks to the bullying by Meaningful Use regulation. But even that is a very regimented approach to this meta-analysis, and may not suffice for an ideal user. Hence the value-add opportunity.
- Client-Sales Support: Very interesting. This seems to be an administrative dashboard for provider groups, self-insured employer groups to analyze of potential savings for a population. So it goes beyond just the clinical aspect of Population Health Management. I can see that as a separate sell to administrative, non-clinical users.
Buoyed by the hype that usually accompanies anything new Health IT, PHM is ready to bask in media limelight. But this may be one of the rare occurrences where there is actual substance underlying the claim to fame. Of course, only time will tell. One thing is for sure – you will see this term splattered across a lot of vendor booths in HIMSS 2014.