There is a strong interest in the healthcare providers tackling population health management, especially as it relates to efforts to build Accountable Care Organizations. The idea of identifying a regional population including all care settings, acute, ambulatory, skilled nursing facilities and more, then sorting out the high risk, chronic illness members for improving their health is very admirable. Large healthcare organizations and healthcare plans are under real pressure to get these programs underway immediately to lower costs, share risk and improve healthcare. The real challenge is determining how to measure the success of population health management.
Our current healthcare system is built to be reactionary. When a patient enters the system, the healthcare system reacts with processes to return the patient to as close to a healthy state as possible. Population health management should be built to be proactive. PHM would track the wellness of the individual, focusing on methods to avoid interactions with the healthcare system unless necessary. It seems ironic that healthcare systems would undertake population health management when it could reduce revenue and interactions with the current system. More importantly, are there consistent methods for evaluating the wellness of a person in an identified population and can we find the people that rarely or never interact with the current healthcare system?
When you consider that depression, stress and weight problems represent the majority of underlying factors against wellness, are survey tools and current data capture methods in healthcare up to the task of identifying underlying causes to change behaviors and address root issues? One of the more interesting projects taken on recently with the technology from IBM’s successful Watson project is to have the natural language processing capability of that solution read patient narratives and pinpoint underlying causes of readmissions on congestive heart failure. This development is promising because the interesting opportunities to improve population health management may lie in our ability to listen to people’s life stories, analyze them, and model their impact on their health. Sounds very much like the family doctor that has time to get to know their patients, right?
Can we change our perspective in healthcare from being reactive to proactive? I hope so, but what do you think?
