Perfect timing for Virtual Health platform

The shift to value-based reimbursement is all about providing tools across the care continuum and Virtual Health, a company focused on population health, aims to provide the platform for any provider to do just that.

When he came on board in 2012, CTO Jack Plotkin said, the goal was to create the first true population health management platform and the challenge was to create “something that would work across all the traditional healthcare silos.” To manage a population, it couldn’t just be a care coordination platform or a patient portal or an EHR or a telehealth system, he told Clinical Innovation + Technology.

“We’re seeing tremendous traction right now because of the tremendous shift in healthcare. The shift in payment structure is the largest shift in healthcare in our lifetimes. The line between providers and payers is being blurred. All the traditional silos are falling apart as the walls come down.” The only way to ensure care will be delivered effectively and efficiently is by providing the full care continuum, he said. That requires technology capable of pulling data from legacy systems.

Organizations need a platform that can put all the pieces together in a variety of formats. Plotkin said HL7 is a great concept but is limited and “it’s unrealistic to expect all entities to conform to single standards.”

It’s about providing tools, he said, including analytics, risk stratification and reporting to “extract actionable analytics and creating workflows so care coordinators can immediately identify high-risk individuals, support compliance and ultimately, deliver better care.”

Virtual Health is “happy to serve as an overlay on existing systems,” Plotkin said. Time will tell if the timing is right for their platform but he believes it is a necessary solution because “it makes sense to have as much patient information available in real time to provider that need it as possible.” It also made sense before to have all the data in one place but now it makes financial sense. “When you have alignment between what is socially good and financially good--which is rare—you see a tremendous upswell in the adoption of these types of new technologies.”

For this year’s HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition, Plotkin said population health and patient engagement would be significant talking points. “Those are critical themes. We’ve seen great strides made by individual organizations but these issues really haven’t been solved on a universal basis.”