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NOV / DEC 2014
I
Healthcare Journal of new orleans
Trending:
What to Look For
in 2015
In health care, there’s
always a certain element
of the unknown – new
government mandates,
rule changes and the like
– and while we generally
can’t be prepared for
the unexpected, we can
certainly plan for the
expected.
enable us to more
effectively and ef-
ficiently manage
high-risk patients
while supplying proactive
care to patients, both dur-
ing and between interactions
with the health care system.
Further, we should integrate this
patient-centered approach with ro-
bust health information technology (IT) in-
frastructures capable of recording, storing
and analyzing the massive volumes of patient
data. By employing performance-based ana-
lytics, we may be able to identify and reverse
trends in care that result in poor outcomes
and high costs.
But in deploying PHM strategies, there are
issues that should be considered. Accord-
ing to the Institute for Health Technology
Transformation’s research report, Popula-
tion Health Management: A Roadmap for
Provider-Based Automation in a New Era
of Healthcare, “At an operational level, orga-
nizations must change their structure as well
as workflows to implement PHM and adopt
new types of automation tools and reporting.
This will require setting clear goals, the active
participation of leadership, an assessment of
technology requirements and an effective
rollout strategy.”
Ideally, a PHM strategy is rolled out in
phases. The first phase should focus on pa-
tient-centric care transformation, followed
In 2015, we should expect and plan for
three key items: population health manage-
ment (PHM), patient engagement and penal-
ties related to governmental mandates.
Increasingly, health care providers and
organizations are tasked with delivering
the highest quality of care at the lowest cost
possible, and doing so not just for individual
patients, but for entire patient populations.
This focus on cost reduction and quality im-
provement, coupled with a growing emphasis
on patient-centric care and the transition to
a value-based health care system, are com-
bining to make PHM a primary objective for
health care providers.
We can prepare for PHM efforts by em-
bracing patient-centric care models that
by the adoption and implementation of
health IT tools such as electronic health re-
cords (EHRs) and connectivity to an ana-
lytics-enabled health information exchange
(HIE). In the final phase, the patient-centric
care model and health IT infrastructure can
be leveraged to identify at-risk populations,
recurring care trends and neg-
ative outcomes.
As these phases are com-
pleted and integrated, pop-
ulation health im-
provements can be
achieved, care qual-
ity and outcomes
will improve, and the
transition from volume to val-
ue will be a smoother one for
providers and organizations.
Thus, the investment in, and integration
of, patient-focused care, health IT and
analytics to drive PHM should be a priority
objective for the coming year.
Another priority objective for the coming
year will be patient engagement. A core re-
quirement of the Meaningful Use program,
patient engagement has ranked among the
most important, yet most challenging, of
objectives for providers and organizations
across the health care spectrum.
The importance of patient engagement
is based on the commonly accepted un-
derstanding that patients who have been
empowered with the information and tools
necessary to make positive decisions about
their care tend to be healthier and have better
outcomes. Patient engagement is also asso-
ciated with higher levels of satisfaction and
reduced costs related with unnecessary and
unwanted care.
While the benefits of true patient engage-
ment are many, the challenges in achieving it
are complex and largely non-clinical.
The first of these barriers is health lit-
eracy. Nine out of 10 American adults ex-
press difficulty in using the everyday health