The State of Population Health Strategies in Hospitals, Practices
Hospitals, health systems, and provider practices are at various stages of population health strategy development and expanding predictive analytics capabilities may be the next step.
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- Improving predictive analytics capabilities may be key to advancing providers’ population health strategies and their ability to engage in value-based contracting, according to Emily Sokol, director of research at Xtelligent Healthcare Media.
Sokol referenced a recent Insights report in her comments on Healthcare Strategies. The report drew responses from 150 healthcare decision makers from federally qualified health centers, hospitals, primary care physician practices, and specialists and addressed the topic of population health data.
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Physician practices were farther behind the hospital systems in developing their population health strategies. Health systems and hospitals were more likely to be in the later stages of implementation, assessing how they could expand and optimize their population health approaches.
To Sokol, it did not come as a shock to find that physician practices tended to struggle with developing population health strategies while hospitals and health systems were already in the implementation phases.
However, Sokol was surprised to discover how challenging it is for providers to tie data to outcomes.
“There's this big call, not just for better data, but for better technologies, software, and training that are going to help people actually use the data that that is out there,” Sokol said.
“The information is there, the challenge is really how do we make it actionable? How do we analyze it effectively? How do we communicate those results to providers? And then how do we empower providers to use that data to ultimately impact patient care and improve patient outcomes?”
Despite these lingering questions and challenges, providers are pushing for more advanced analytics.
Respondents told the research team that gap closure is now routine for providers. In order to take the next step-in population health management, providers require even more detailed data through predictive analytics. They need to know what the total cost of care will be, how risk could fluctuate, and other nuanced factors.
The provider community may not be fully prepared for that step, but Sokol indicated that as providers gain confidence in how to handle predictive analytics, their openness and ability to enter into value-based contracts may also expand.
