Six Steps to Success with Population Health
Shared accountability agreements create significant financial incentives for providers who capitalize on them. Doing so requires population health management initiatives that systematically improve clinical outcomes while reducing costs.
Collecting and analyzing data play a crucial role in population health management. With big-picture insight into patient populations and utilization trends, you can focus your care managers on the right patient interventions and seamlessly transition to accountable care—without disrupting clinical workflows.
Here are six actionable steps you can follow to create an effective population health management program.
- Aggregate your data. The first step toward achieving success in an accountable care environment is capitalizing on a solution that will aggregate all of your clinical and claims data so you can identify areas of opportunity. The data helps you understand how you’ve performed historically so you can focus on the areas where you are ready to take on risk rather than entering into contracts blindly.
- Analyze your data. Static reports and raw data by itself do little to enable clinical and cost improvements. Advanced, self-service data analytics give you the capabilities you need to easily design and measure population health initiatives.
- Communicate with patients. Once you’ve identified disease management opportunities and intervention initiatives, you can proactively communicate to those at-risk patient populations. Involving patients in their own care goes a long way toward improving patient engagement.
- Engage clinicians. To drive clinical improvement, it’s important to get physician buy-in and align physicians around the organization’s population health strategies and metrics. The key is to show physicians the facts, utilizing evidence-based practices.
- Measure success. Monitor your organization’s performance on your P4P and HEDIS quality measures in near real-time. This ensures that you will be able to focus on areas of improvement throughout the year prior to reporting your results.
- Start at home. Integrated delivery networks have practiced the concepts behind population health management long before the advent of accountable care. Follow their lead and start your population health initiatives with your self-insured populations.
To get started, learn more about MedeAnalytics Population Health or email us.
Get our take on industry trends
How to help employer groups plan in a time of uncertainty
Employers and their sponsored health plans are thinking about next year’s benefit designs with a significant challenge not seen before: the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. There are important considerations to take into account before making any decisions about new or existing coverage. Becky Niehus, a director of Product Consulting at MedeAnalytics, explores these new issues and what employers can do to ensure employees are “covered.”
Read on...
Healthcare’s return to “normal” after COVID-19: Is it possible?
As providers determine how to get patients to return to facilities for routine disease management and preventive screenings, opportunities are ripe for the application of analytics to triage at the right time to the right setting. Data related to COVID-19 will continue to flow rapidly, but there are possibly more questions than answers now about a return to “normal.”
Read on...
Avoid COVID-19 modeling pitfalls by eliminating bias, using good data
COVID-19 models are being used every day to predict the course and short- and long-term impacts of the pandemic. And we’ll be using these COVID-19 models for months to come.
Read on...
Population Health Amid the Coronavirus Outbreak
In speaking with many colleagues throughout the provider and payer healthcare community, I’ve found an overwhelming sense of helplessness to the outbreak’s onslaught. This is exacerbated by the constant evolution of reported underlying medical conditions that indicate a higher risk of hospitalization or mortality for a coronavirus patient.
Read on...