Analytics report: data critical to future of ACOs, population health

“Population health management, a model designed to maximize the health and minimize the cost of caring for a defined population, requires clinical analytics to improve the quality of care and reduce avoidable hospital admissions,” according to a new report released by the Institute of Health Technology Transformation. "Analytics: The Nervous System of IT-Enabled Healthcare" covers how accountable care organizations (ACOs) will need good understanding of their costs in order to manage financial risk, how they can improve upon data collection and how to optimize analytics.

The report acknowledges that there is “no single roadmap to achieving analytics excellence,” but says the following steps are critical:

• Risk-stratify the patient population so that care teams can intervene with the high-risk patients who generate the majority of costs;
• Identify the care gaps of all patients and provide actionable data to remedy them;
• Build partnerships with health plans in order to obtain claims data; and
• Prepare physicians for big changes in how they practice medicine.

The future offers great potential with advances in data such as genomics and environmental factors, the report says. “With the proper analytics, these huge data pools could supply new insights into disease causes and treatments. But for now, most healthcare organizations just need analytics to ensure that patients receive appropriate care and stay as healthy as possible.

The report offers healthcare organizations several recommendations, including the following:

• Construct a data warehouse that is the single source of truth for all the data your organization aggregates. Ensure consistency of data and terminology in addition to establishing a robust data mapping and cleaning process.
• Track process information such as patient outreach efforts and patient compliance with physician recommendations.
• Change the analytic perspective from episode-based or procedure-based analyses to patient-based and population-wide views. Manage the population for the individual with a longitudinal care approach.
• Ensure data availability is real time and accurate so that the information is timely enough to help clinicians intervene with patients.
• Integrate claims and administrative data with clinical data from EHRs to provide a 360-degree view of patient care.
• Don’t boil the ocean. Big things have small beginnings. The entire process will need piloting, evaluation and ongoing improvement.