The need to simultaneously reduce healthcare costs and deliver optimal care are driving the expansion of population health management initiatives among hospitals today.
Add to that mix the rising number of patients with chronic conditions, the rapidly growing Silver Tsunami population with its longer lifespans, the shift to value-based care and it's no wonder healthcare entities are under more pressure than ever before.
So it's also not surprising that many software vendors are rushing into the market, from the dominant EHR makers to pure-play pop health specialists.
What can hospitals do now to prepare for the future of population health management?
Start by understanding what products will best meet your particular needs, know that social determinants of health and patient-generated data will only become more and more important and recognize that as pop health programs evolve so too, will hospitals' expectations for the technologies that underpin them.
Tech vendors today
Software comprises the largest chunk of the population health management market and is expected to reach $33.73 billion by the end of 2025, according to Wahid Khan, lead analyst at BIS Research."Cloud-based population health management software is evolving as the most preferred mode of software delivery and is anticipated to witness a high growth rate of 21.2 percent during the forecast period," Khan said.
Some of the more prominent population health companies, according to KLAS, include IBM Watson Health, Philips Wellcentive and HealthEC, right alongside EHR vendors including Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner and Epic.
What's more, health IT research specialist Black Book predicted that Epic, Cerner and Allscripts will emerge as dominant population health vendors amid the already-underway wave of consolidation, mergers and acquisitions.
All of which means that picking a particular product among so many available options today is tricky. But hospital and IT executives should know that HIMSS Analytics Research Director Brendan Fitzgerald said earlier this year EHRs, portals and patient engagement tools are the most popular now for population health management initiatives. The firm's research also found hospitals implementing data aggregation, health information exchange, business intelligence and analytics software to advance pop health.
In other words: There's no one-size-fits-all pop health platform so hospitals should understand the range while also knowing that analysts are predicting the list of products and vendors will continue to get whittled down and, as such, become more manageable in the relative near-term.
Analytics like Facebook and Amazon
As population health management projects become more and more advanced, hospitals are going to need not only new technologies but new ways of thinking about their data. Yes, this means predictive and prescriptive analytics and ultimately artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and machine learning.Leonard D'Avolio, CEO of machine learning startup Cyft pointed to data-savvy technology giants Amazon, Facebook, Google and Spotify as particularly apt at using their information by innovating in-house. Amazon, for instance, could not have simply bought a software platform and then plugged it into its network to suddenly start what D'Avolio called "population bookselling." What's more, the online retailer does not consider every person to be the same consumer, just like not every patient is the same.
"Amazon understands you based on the data," D'Avolio said. "That's the foundation for transformation."
Amazon, Facebook and the other companies use all of their data, not just one type, to answer as many questions as possible, D'Avolio added. They're also harnessing cutting-edge technologies to determine those answers.
Source: Healthcare IT News (View full article)
Posted by Dan Corcoran on December 4, 2017 06:54 AM
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