Readers Write: Connecting Smart Data Analytics and Population Health Management

Connecting Smart Data Analytics and Population Health Management
By Shane Pilcher

Healthcare organizations across the country are accumulating copious amounts of clinical and claims-related data. The amount of data, partially driven by Meaningful Use initiatives, is expected to increase exponentially over the foreseeable future. According to studies from McKinsey, Gartner, and others, data are being generated at staggering rates, with volume reaching exabytes (a million terabytes) and even zettabytes (a billion terabytes) each year. The Kaiser Family Foundation forecasts that the volume of healthcare data gathered will grow 50-fold between 2013 and 2020.

Faced with potentially zettabytes of data, it is no wonder that many healthcare organizations around the country are approaching data analytics with some trepidation. According to the third annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey, conducted by our firm, more than 84 percent of CIOs, CMIOs, IT project managers, IT directors, and consultants had questions around type, quantity, and ways in which to use their healthcare data. In addition, 62 percent stated the biggest barrier to IT initiatives around MU and data analytics was a lack of organizational buy-in or financial resources. As a first step to overcoming these issues, it is important to transition from just a data analytics focus to a smart healthcare data analytics approach.

The transition to a smart healthcare data strategy requires ensuring the organization is collecting the right type of data and in the right quantities. This requires a careful evaluation of the organization’s current HIT tools and an assessment of how and where the data are captured, and how the information can be accessed. Once an organization has the tools and workflow to transform data into smart healthcare data, effective and reliable analytics can begin.

Population Health Management Essential

One of the strongest and growing trends around smart healthcare data and analysis is population health management. With 40 percent of survey participants indicating improved patient care across the healthcare continuum as their key business objective in 2015, the trend toward PHM is no surprise.

In analyzing claims, clinical, lab, imaging, and medication data, profiles begin to emerge to help identify at-risk patients within an organization’s patient population. These at-risk profiles help providers develop customized treatment plans and follow-up methods, which can reduce that risk and improve their outcomes. At-risk profiles can isolate a particular diagnosis population, focusing on conditions affecting the greatest percentage of the healthcare organization’s patients, or targeting a specific diagnosis or demographic subset for strategic results.

The use of smart healthcare data analytics does not stop there. Karen DeSalvo, National Coordinator for Health IT, recently stated that data can provide a broader view of population health that can help communities prioritize which health issues are the most pressing: “There’s an opportunity to be more inclusive of data sources, not only from public health, but social and human services agencies and, of course, patient-generated health data and patient-reported outcomes.”

Patient-Generated Data Fill Gaps

By including patient-generated data, such as blood-glucose readings, blood pressure, daily diet, and exercise routines, providers can take PHM to a new level of provider and patient engagement. This leads to improved monitoring and tracking of treatment regimen adherence and individual patient responses, which can alert providers when patients need treatment changes or increased support between patient visits. The agility this engagement brings to care delivery yields improved patient outcomes with fewer unplanned visits and hospitalizations, ultimately reducing care-delivery costs.

Once we break the surface of smart healthcare data analytics and transition to PHM, imagination is really the only limitation. If an organization can imagine the questions to ask of its smart healthcare data, the right analysis can guide providers to the desired patient outcomes while decreasing the cost of care.

Shane Pilcher is vice president of Stoltenberg Consulting, Inc.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 5/15/15

Top News

Population health, precision medicine, and chronic-care management company Persivia launches under the direction of Mansoor Khan, MD CEO and Fauzia Khan, CMO. The husband and wife team seem to be the same pair who worked in similar roles at Alere Analytics before it was shut down by parent company Alere earlier this year.

Webinars

May 19 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Lock the Windows, Not Just the Door: Why Most Healthcare Breaches Involve Phishing Attacks and How to Prevent Them.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Glynn Stanton, CISSP, information security manager, Yale New Haven Health System; David Ting, CTO, Imprivata. Nearly half of healthcare organizations will be successfully cyberhacked in 2015, many of them by hackers who thwart perimeter defenses by using social engineering instead. The entire network is exposed if even one employee is fooled by what looks like a security warning or Office update prompt and enters their login credentials. This webinar will provide real-world strategies for protecting against these attacks.

May 20 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Principles and Priorities of Accountable Care Transformation.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Marie Dunn, director of analytics, Health Catalyst. Healthcare systems must build the competencies needed to succeed under value-based payment models while remaining financially viable in the fee-for-service landscape. This webinar will outline key near-term priorities for building competency at successfully managing at-risk contracts, with a particular focus on the importance of leveraging data to drive effective decision making.

May 27 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Introducing Health Catalyst Academy: An Innovative Approach for Accelerating Outcomes Improvement.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenters: Tommy Prewitt, MD, director, Healthcare Delivery Institute at Horne LLP; Bryan Oshiro, MD, SVP and chief medical officer, Health Catalyst.  The presenters, graduates of Intermountain’s Advanced Training Program, will introduce the Health Catalyst Academy’s Accelerated Practices program, a unique learning experience that provides the tools and knowledge for participants to improve quality, lower cost, accelerate improvement, and sustain gains.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Symphony Performance Health rebrands to SPH Analytics to better reflect the company’s expanded analytics capabilities since acquiring The Myers Group, a member/patient experience survey company, last week. SPHA was originally formed via the merger of Voyance, MDdatacor, and Archimedes Clinical Analytics.

Allscripts CFO Richard Poulton explains on the company’s earnings call that the possibility of acquiring population health management companies is “definitely an area this is high on our list of areas to invest in. Whether it’s purely an acquisition, though, is a different question. I don’t have to tell you that some of the companies that are out there, fairly immature companies, are with advertised capabilities are trading at crazy valuations. We’ve looked at a bunch and we’ll continue to look at a bunch, but right now, we have a pretty good plan that is not heavily dependent on acquisitions.”

Announcements and Implementations

Mercy Health (MO), Mosaic Life Care (MO), and Missouri Health Care team up to form MPact Heatlh. The collaborative will work to create a database to support population health, expand telemedicine services to underserved areas, and work with payers to offer low-cost network options for patients.

Greenway Health launches the Greenway Community suite of analytic, risk stratification, care management, and data exchange solutions. The population health management tool integrates with the company’s EHR platforms, plus others, as well as HIEs and immunization registries.

New Jersey-based Regional Cancer Care Associates and Osler Health IPA collaborate to share data between their physicians via combined use of RCCA’s COSTA analytics tool and Osler’s proprietary MDclick population health management, disease severity stratification, and analytics platform.

People

Seattle Children’s promotes Sandy Melzer, MD to executive vice president for networks and population health.

Research and Innovation

The University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies will develop an online community health and public safety data dashboard to help local officials respond to behavioral health issues as they emerge. Monitored data points will include arrests for behavioral health issues, subsequent ER visits, number of calls to crisis lines, number of homeless on shelter waiting lists, size of the waiting list for youth drop-in services, and the number of people in opiate treatment centers and on waiting lists for those services. Participating organizations include the University of Vermont Medical Center, the Howard Center, Burlington Police Department, and Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. The publicly accessible dashboard will go live in August.

Other

Non-profit Tri-County Health Network (SC) looks at incorporating music therapy into its population health management strategy, particularly in the area of chronic-disease management, after hearing from Barry Bittman, MD senior vice president – chief population health officer, Highmark Allegheny Health Network, at its annual conference. Bittman, who is also CEO and president of the Yamaha Music & Wellness Institute, is researching the role of gospel music in the healing process.

Techwire looks at at the California Health and Human Services Agency’s Open Data portal ahead of the National Day of Civic Hacking: Health 2.0 Developer Challenge in early June in Sacramento. The portal includes data sets, charts, and maps on population health indicators, facility performance, and access to services, among other categories. The competition will award a total of $20,000 to teams that harness the data sets to raise consumer and policymaker awareness around community healthcare issues.

Funny for your Friday, courtesy of @doc_rob

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise will exhibit at the TriZetto Annual Healthcare Conference May 17-20 in Orlando.
• ADP AdvancedMD offers a sneak peek of its solution for any browser.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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News 5/14/15

Top News

Outpatient IS and RCM vendor SourceMedical acquires LaClaro, a Colorado-based company specializing in RCM services for outpatient centers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will add automated workflows, analytics, and management reporting to SourceMedical’s solutions for ambulatory surgery centers and other outpatient facilities.

Webinars

May 19 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Lock the Windows, Not Just the Door: Why Most Healthcare Breaches Involve Phishing Attacks and How to Prevent Them.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Glynn Stanton, CISSP, information security manager, Yale New Haven Health System; David Ting, CTO, Imprivata. Nearly half of healthcare organizations will be successfully cyberhacked in 2015, many of them by hackers who thwart perimeter defenses by using social engineering instead. The entire network is exposed if even one employee is fooled by what looks like a security warning or Office update prompt and enters their login credentials. This webinar will provide real-world strategies for protecting against these attacks.

May 20 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Principles and Priorities of Accountable Care Transformation.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Marie Dunn, director of analytics, Health Catalyst. Healthcare systems must build the competencies needed to succeed under value-based payment models while remaining financially viable in the fee-for-service landscape. This webinar will outline key near-term priorities for building competency at successfully managing at-risk contracts, with a particular focus on the importance of leveraging data to drive effective decision making.

Tweet Chat

Check out the recap of the #HIStalking tweet chat with host @LAlupusLady. The most popular discussion topic pertained to online communities turning patient concerns into “action with impact.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Non-profit patient education company Healthwise celebrates 40 years in business. Founder and CEO Don Kemper attributes his zeal for patient education and engagement to his time as a “young lieutenant in the U.S. Public Health Service.”

Announcements and Implementations

Greenway Health launches the Greenway Community suite of analytic, risk stratification, care management, and data exchange solutions. The population health management tool integrates with the company’s EHR platforms, plus others, as well as HIEs, and immunization registries.

Horizon Health Care receives federal funding to open a community health center in Fort Thompson, S.D. Scheduled to open September 1, the new facility will implement Horizon’s PM and EHR system from Greenway Health, and incorporate telemedicine services.

NextGen Healthcare will integrate Wolters Kluwer’s ProVation Clinic Note documentation tool and ProVation Order Sets templates into its new NextGen Now EHR.

Research and Innovation

Australian researchers develop a low-cost mobile phone app that can help healthcare workers diagnose pneumonia in third-world countries. Designed for feature phones, the app uses touch tones to detect accelerated breathing rates, a common indication of the illness. It is currently being tested in Uganda, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.

A Commonwealth Fund study of community health centers and clinics finds that while patient engagement via mobile phones can assist with medication and appointment reminders, weight management, and smoking cessation, there is limited evidence of improving outcomes via those devices in underserved populations.

A survey of 1,000 practices across Ohio, Florida, Delaware, Texas, and New York reveals that physicians are facing revenue loss due to inaccurate coding, lack of timely account receivable follow-ups, and cumbersome eligibility verification and denial management processes. While the survey results aren’t that eye-opening, it would be interesting to dig into how many of these practices are busy preparing for ICD-10, and whether practice managers feel the new code set will improve or hurt coding accuracy.

Government and Politics

Optum declares its work on Healthcare.gov finished, adding that it will not seek to continue its role as senior adviser of upgrades to the website. The company was brought in to rescue the federal health insurance exchange in the fall of 2013. Former Optum Group Executive Vice President Andy Slavitt left the company last year to become principal deputy administrator at CMS. He now serves as acting administrator.

Telemedicine

The Alabama House of Representatives authorizes the state to join the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. Already enacted in six other states, the compact helps to speed up the ability of physicians to be licensed in multiple states, is also seen as a tool that will speed up telemedicine adoption in participating states. The ATA has given the state a cumulative “C” score for its telemedicine-related physician practice standards and licensure.

Other

Kaiser Health News profiles the ups and downs of L.A. County’s eConsult program. Started in 2012, the program enables PCPs to electronically consult with specialists on behalf of community health center and clinic patients who might otherwise have to wait months for a specialist appointment. The program has streamlined the referral process, but has not made enough of a dent to please participating PCPs, who are not reimbursed for the digital exchanges. As one overburdened physician succinctly explains, “Technology doesn’t solve the problems that were there before technology.”

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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5/14 #HIStalking Tweet Chat Recap

News 5/13/15

Top News

Online healthcare marketplace MDsave receives a $12 million investment from private equity firm MTS Health Investors, and adds MTS Partner Oliver Moses to its board. The company will use the funds to bolster its platform, which offers cash-paying consumers access to negotiated savings on bundled healthcare procedures like office visits, imaging, and surgeries.

Webinars

May 19 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Lock the Windows, Not Just the Door: Why Most Healthcare Breaches Involve Phishing Attacks and How to Prevent Them.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Glynn Stanton, CISSP, information security manager, Yale New Haven Health System; David Ting, CTO, Imprivata. Nearly half of healthcare organizations will be successfully cyberhacked in 2015, many of them by hackers who thwart perimeter defenses by using social engineering instead. The entire network is exposed if even one employee is fooled by what looks like a security warning or Office update prompt and enters their login credentials. This webinar will provide real-world strategies for protecting against these attacks.

May 20 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Principles and Priorities of Accountable Care Transformation.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Marie Dunn, director of analytics, Health Catalyst. Healthcare systems must build the competencies needed to succeed under value-based payment models while remaining financially viable in the fee-for-service landscape. This webinar will outline key near-term priorities for building competency at successfully managing at-risk contracts, with a particular focus on the importance of leveraging data to drive effective decision making.

Tweet Chat

Amanda Greene (@LAlupusLady) will host the next #HIStalking tweet chat on Thursday, May 14 at 1pm ET. As a lupus sufferer, she’s is particularly excited about hosting during Lupus Awareness Month. You can view discussion topics here.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Grand Rounds opens its Sierra Patient Center in Reno, NV, where it expects to fill 200 jobs over the next several years. The San Francisco-based business offers a technology platform that helps consumers seek counsel and connect with leading physicians of various medical fields in order to get more accurate diagnoses and treatment, typically through an employer. The company also offers “Record Specialists,” which collect and digitize medical records for customers – a service I’m sure many of us would prefer to pawn off on a third party if we were so financially inclined.

PM and consulting firm Medical Revenue Systems opens an office in Kingwood, TX.

Telemedicine

The Colorado Rural Health Center selects video-conferencing and decision-support software from Script Adviser to help improve infectious disease treatment in rural parts of the state.

The American Telemedicine Association calls the latest iteration of the 21st Century Cures bill a disappointment in its lack of telemedicine provisions. “The new version of the bill leaves the Medicare program in the slow lanes while states, private payers and every other developed nation are quickly adopting the use of technology to transform the delivery of health care,” explains Jonathan Linkous, ATA CEO. “It is ironic that a bill titled the 21st Century Cures will leave Medicare and Medicaid patients firmly in the 20th Century when it comes to delivering healthcare.”

Government and Politics

CMS looks for 850 volunteers from a range of provider and claim types to participate in ICD-10 end-to-end testing with Medicare Administrative Contractors and the Common Electronic Data Interchange contract the week of July 20. The agency will accept volunteers through May 22.

Sixty-one senators write FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler (nearly 20 more than signed a similar letter in 2014) asking for modernization of the federal University Service Fund, which helps bring broadband to rural communities. The program includes the $400 million Healthcare Connect Fund, criticized for its inefficiencies in helping providers adopt broadband. (For any AP sticklers out there, “POTS” is apparently an acceptable abbreviation for “plain old telephone service.”)

Politico points out during National Women’s Health Week that the VA is still implementing a 2013 recommendation that it develop a process for notifying patients of cervical cancer screening results and documenting those results in the department’s EHR. The lag time highlights the more systemic challenges the VA faces when it comes to providing healthcare services for an increasing number of female vets.

Announcements and Implementations

The Minnesota Radiological Society partners with National Decision Support Co. to offer eligible physicians free access to NDSC’s ACR Select portal, the Web-based version of the American College of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria. The portal, which can be integrated into an EHR, offers clinical-decision support and meets state payer preauthorization requirements.

Research and Innovation

A Twitter analysis finds that physicians tweet nearly 400 messages a day relating to cancer, with messaging related to breast, lung, and prostate cancers making up the bulk of information shared. More than 5,000 providers contributed to the social dialogue in 2014, with a small group of “superusers” doing a big chunk of the tweeting. Researchers surmise that further analysis is needed to determine the influence these social networkers have on information flow to colleagues and patients.

Other

Techwire takes a look at the many projects and possibilities of the California Health and Human Services Agency’s Open Data portal ahead of the National Day of Civic Hacking: Health 2.0 Developer Challenge in early June in Sacramento. The portal includes data sets, charts, and maps on population health indicators, facility performance, and access to services, among other categories. The competition will award a total of $20,000 to teams that harness the data sets to raise consumer and policymaker awareness around healthcare issues.

New technologies presented at Elsevier’s 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology may soon make today’s wearables look like the rotary dial phone gathering dust in my parents’ basement. Scientists presented a credit card-sized device that consumers can use to analyze blood and saliva samples. Results can then be sent to an app or potentially an EHR. A new e-skin was also showcased, touting the ability to diagnose disease in real time and provide instant health assessments while being worn. Innovations like these make devices like the Apple Watch look quaint by comparison.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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