A command center approach to population health management

Page 2 of 2

Strategic collaboration between disparate health system stakeholders

It is also incredibly important for health system stakeholders to collaborate in new and different ways, not just around the care delivery, but a health system’s overall population health strategy. From CMOs, who should be informing and supporting patient access strategies, to CFOs who should be viewed more as chief innovation officers, having a large hand in understanding and articulating the cost-reward of applying to new technologies to solve legacy problems, it is clear the idea of collaboration is changing within the health system. And – savvy systems know that collaboration will be key to long-term success.

Take CIOs for example, they should be looking to extend the remit of their team beyond the four walls of the hospital, extending technologies to a health system’s broader community of independent doctors, not just managing the hospital infrastructure. CIOs in particular, should be held accountable for developing and supporting new collaboration strategies that will drive non-traditional revenue streams, particularly as inpatient volumes decline and future growth becomes more dependent upon outpatient volumes. Only via a command center approach may health systems support this sort of heterogeneous collaboration, providing stakeholders with a central nervous system for accessing pertinent patient and health system information, in real-time – then deducing and articulating workflows from there.

The healthcare industry must acknowledge that health system strategies fail when they force clinicians to perform unnatural workflows based on unwieldy or non-intuitive technologies. Healthcare, by nature of its definition, is something that must be managed in real-time. The reason iOS and the Android operating systems are wildly successful is because they are instinctive and provide consumers with a platform for managing every aspect of their life, on the go – or while at home. They don’t require consumers to sit down at a computer – or be in a fixed location to perform a task. They support consumers with useful applications, regardless of their geography, bending around their lives. Old population health management paradigms force healthcare professionals to marry data silos and analyze data to formulate useful ideas that they may leverage to support care delivery. It isn’t something that happens in real-time, nor is it practical as a long-term strategy for managing a multitude of patients and complex care issues and episodes. Health systems need a centralized model for bringing people and applications together so that data is operationalized at the point of care and beyond.

The healthcare industry is ripe for this kind of change – and only population health management platforms that are designed this way, to serve as a command center hub for interoperable, patient-centric care, will succeed. This model will offer a long-term growth strategy for managing patient care, offering health systems a growing population health management application store, from which they may build their path forward to true value-based care. It will go beyond unsophisticated electronic health records and clunky analytics platforms and indistinct data outputs. They will help organizations run various critical programs at once, efficiently, while encouraging interoperability and collaboration across their heterogeneous environments, within and outside of their health system, allowing for improved care coordination and patient outcomes, and system scalability.