17 Jun Bridging the Social Determinants of Health Gap Between Payers and Providers

One of the challenges of embracing Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) is that patients don’t often like to disclose information about their housing, access to healthy foods, or transportation challenges.

Conversely, for providers, it is often difficult to ask patients SDOH-related questions, which are important to providing the best quality of care possible.

To address this, the Community Health Plan of Washington is embracing both training providers and population health management tools to bridge the SDOH gap between payers and providers, according to this recent Health Payer Intelligence article.

In 2017, the Community Health Plan of Washington began working with the state to create new 59 codes that identified patient social needs. Frontline staff at the plan’s community health centers also began working with patients to complete assessments that captured this information.

The payer then leveraged population health management tools to aggregate and analyze the state of their patient population. This effort allowed them to understand the needs of its entire population, deciding where to divide resources based on need. It also allows the plan to stratify its patient population based on gaps in care and conduct appropriate outreach.

As SDOH and population health efforts continue to come into the forefront for payers, the right health data management tools can serve as the foundation.

For example, IMAT Solutions’ robust data management platform helps payers to better align claims and clinical systems to inform and drive new SDOH and population health initiatives, as well as help to measure the outcomes of these efforts.

Leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP), IMAT customers have been able to identify SDOH indicators that already exist within their data to better identify those at risk. From Provider Dashboards to Business Intelligence tools to longitudinal patient charts, IMAT’s Health Data Analytic capabilities can transform population health and risk management for payers.

To learn more about how payers can best harness their data for improved analytics, interoperability and outcomes, please click here.