In a healthcare world where the focus shifts from fee-for-service to fee-for-value, organizations need more advanced technology to succeed in their mission to enhance outcomes. Population health management is essential in a value-based care future. Achieving better health outcomes for a group of individuals (and more health equity to ensure quality outcomes for more people in a population) requires massive amounts of data, along with the analytics capabilities to pull meaningful insights from your data.
In a recent article published in HealthIT Analytics, Shania Kennedy outlines the necessary software tools for effective population health management – and Cedar Gate’s comprehensive value-based care platform checks all the boxes.
Healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) have long struggled with the challenge of disparate, siloed data. The tremendous volume of patient data should make it easier to manage and improve care. But when that data comes from so many sources (that were not built to work together), it becomes much more difficult. As noted in the article, that includes information from “EHRs, patient-reported outcomes, disease registries, claims, geospatial information, demographic and socioeconomic information, SDOH data, public health surveillance, and other sources.”
The only way to make sense of this data and use it to improve care is with an enterprise data management system which:
Another critical capability for HDOs is predictive analytics. It is a topic that has received a lot of attention in recent months with the giant leaps in artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities. As in many industries, AI and ML present significant opportunities to identify opportunities for cost savings and creating efficiencies – in healthcare, these technologies have the compelling added value of driving improved care. When the consequential impact of leveraging the information from AI and ML models is so high – in healthcare it can be life or death – the stakes are much higher and the value more critical. Organizations must have software tools they can trust to get it right.
The key, according to HealthIT Analytics, is finding software that uses “well-integrated data and a solid predictive analytics strategy.” With Cedar Gate’s unified data lake and advanced data integration, our tools go beyond just reporting on information in your dataset. They can be used for:
Risk stratification is another critical challenge for organizations participating in value-based care models. It is a well-known fact that a small percent of total patients accounts for a large share of healthcare dollars spent in the United States. These same patients often need more intervention to achieve good health outcomes.
To achieve value-based care goals of lowering total cost of care and improving care quality, HDOs must be able to “categorize patients based on their health status, in addition to other clinical, social, and behavioral factors,” says HealthIT Analytics. With that information, you can manage risk-stratified cohorts appropriately. That means proactively managing a population, anticipating health needs, and steering more resources to those who are most likely to need care and for whom the care will have the most impact.
Cedar Gate’s population health and care management tools were built with those tasks in mind. They seamlessly integrate with our Enterprise Data Management and Analytics tools to identify populations at risk, surface specific needs based on cohorts’ or individual patients’ risk, and target interventions that will improve care quality and outcomes.
If you do not have all these tools today, we are ready to help. Our composable platform is designed to provide exactly the tools you need at whatever point you are in your value-based care journey. Start with a single application integrated into your existing IT ecosystem or talk to our team about getting our full end-to-end platform for Analytics, Population Health, and Payment Technology.
