If you keep your ear to the ground, you can hear that the population health train is on its way. It’s not quite here yet, but it’s coming. At industry conferences and expos, the exploding number of vendors who have developed impressive population health and care management applications is only one of the dozens of indicators that show “population health” isn’t just a buzzword. The industry’s push towards implementing “value-based care” over the broken “fee-for-service” model reflects an immense desire to keep care patient-centric, rather than dollar-centric.
But, we’re still not where we need to be. A study released earlier this year by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) reported that only 38% of 330 U.S. hospitals and health systems surveyed have integrated population health solutions into their business processes. This means that even though we’ve come leaps and bounds, we still have a long way to go.
As I mentioned in a previous post, processing and analyzing big data is one of the most critical aspects of the continued transition to value-based population health management. But with the availability of this data, comes the responsibility of using it to benefit patients and improve outcomes. Over 90% of the world’s data was collected in just the past 3 years. This means we are still brand new to this enormous load of data we have streaming in, and we haven’t quite figured out how to exploit it.
And that’s where the Synapse solution comes into the picture. When we put Synapse into the hands of ACOs and other healthcare organizations, we’re giving them a tool that turns the terabytes of data collected into true patient insights. Providers can then take the guesswork out of identifying high-risk patients or ensure care plans are suited for a patient’s specific lifestyle and needs, such as geographic location or daily schedule. Scheduling, assessing and managing care for patients in a manner that not only works best for them, but also maximizes provider resources, has never been simpler. We’re giving providers the tools they need to develop care plans with the touch of finger. Care management through the cloud is no longer a lofty goal, but the standard to which we hold ourselves. We’re taking the one-size-fits-all approach out of healthcare, and creating a customized care experience that ensure providers are exploiting all their scheduling and care management resources and that their patients directly benefit.
We know that population health is here to stay. The benefits it directly gives to both patients and providers are far ahead of what we had with fee-for-service models, and treatment outcomes are showing vast improvements. With the results providers are seeing after using the simple, smart Synapse solution, it won’t be long before the 38% of hospitals with population health programs turns into 100%.