Population Health Management
While the United States spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, it consistently ranks among the lowest in terms of efficiency. According to a recent Bloomberg study on healthcare costs and efficiency, the United States ranked 46th out of 48 countries, coming in only slightly higher than Serbia and Brazil, and ranking lower than Algeria, China, and Iran. Simply put, Americans pay more but receive dramatically less in terms of healthcare. While the topic of how to fix the broken healthcare system in the United States is a hotly debated topic, most agree that significant changes need to be made.
Healthcare delivery reform is at the heart of many of these debates. It is an area where the effective and thorough use of data can play an integral role in improving efficiencies in care. Population Health Management plays a key role in this process.
IMAT aggregates, normalizes, indexes, and codifies all patient data from across the continuum of care
Population Health Management exists to monitor, track, and improve the quality of health for those in a specific geographic area. While the goal is to improve the quality of health, the focus is on how to achieve it through the proactive efforts of integrated care networks, such as Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMHs).
An ACO, for example, is interested in identifying all patients within their geographic region with diabetes or, even better, pre-stage diabetes. Once these patients have been identified, ACOs next focus on being more proactive in terms of better structuring specific preventative health care measures to meet the needs of these patients and better implement population-wide initiatives that educate and help enable change in healthcare delivery.
The Challenges of working with Population Health Data
To better facilitate Population Health Management, data management and decision support solutions must be comprehensive in their ability to ingest, normalize and validate data from multiple, incompatible sources; scalable to accommodate increasing record loads without adding significant hardware upgrades to the budget; flexible to adapt to constantly changing user and organization needs; and most importantly, fast in its ability to deliver real-time reporting and query results.
IMAT Solutions Meets and Exceeds These Challenges
The IMAT platform is uniquely designed to meet the needs of an integrated care network, ACO, PCMH, HIE or facilitate any medical organization engaged in population health management by connecting to and economically bringing together all data from across a large and diverse continuum of care.
Through the six-step IMAT data ingestion process – Connect, Collect, Validate, Normalize, Index, and Codify – all data, no matter the source, the format or data type can be aggregated into one common data store. This includes narrative information captured as unstructured data. The IMAT platform can capture this vast resource of patient data and make it available for real-time search and reporting.
IMAT’s speed is industry leading. In performance and accuracy benchmarking, the IMAT platform identified complex cohort sets in 2 to 20 seconds, across 2 billion records, representing 19 million patients from 20 data sources. Competing systems took 20 hours to execute the same queries. Imagine conducting and reviewing results of a large cohort analysis, selecting for three or four characteristics, with multiple demographic parameters, during your lunch hour.
The Benefits of IMAT Solutions in Population Health Management
IMAT enables medical professionals to fully utilize their patient data to improve care for individual patients and to spot trends and issues within their population community. With the IMAT system, healthcare organizations can quickly and efficiently compare and contrast patient, provider, and facility performance in a proactive manner using a feature called Scorecard. Users can identify changing trends in population health, monitor performance against new policies or procedures, gain insights into discrepancies in treatment delivery. Complex reports and ad hoc queries, run against millions or billions of records, can deliver results in seconds or minutes, not hours or days.
Discovery – Find groups of patients who are presenting with pre-stage disease symptoms; identify individual patients who are declining before they go critical, from within a much larger cohort. Pro-actively reach out to patients who are identified as not following their treatment plan.
Coordination – Enables ingestion of data from the entire continuum of community care; enables any authorized person to access the system and run ad hoc queries or reports; can output data sets to authorized, external systems for further analysis and processing.
Education – Identify and utilize data to change patterns of treatment and help patients change their habits and lifestyle.
True Predictive Analytics – By utilizing all types of data at their most granular level and over longer time periods, the IMAT platform enables true predictive analytics–predictions based on broader data and lengthier time periods are generally more accurate and useful.