05 Aug Health Payer Priorities in Face of Ongoing Pandemic

The cliché “new normal” has officially become “normal,” as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to expand throughout the nation. Though, during Q2 of 2020 when the pandemic was new, there were many lessons learned and new priorities that emerged for health payers.

A recent Health Payer Intelligence article did a deep dive on UnitedHealth Group’s Q2 earnings report, and in many ways it serves as a crystal ball as to where things are headed for payers.

In addition to highlighting the overall business impact of COVID-19, the report added that UnitedHealthcare saw more than 4 million virtual care visits, which is 30 times the number of visits in January 2020.

The payer discussed how digital and home care will continue expanding. As such, UnitedHealthcare aims to continue leveraging digital signaling and monitoring, engagement, artificial intelligence, electronic pharmacy platforms, community-based organization resources, and telemedicine.

The report also highlighted how UnitedHealthcare is using data and analytics to address long-term disparities, and that coronavirus testing and investments in social determinants of health will continue in the future.

To help achieve these efforts and be continually future-focused, the right health data management solutions play a critical role. 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.