Can Providers Survive If They Don’t Get Population Health Management Right?

Most providers know that they won’t succeed with population health management unless they get some traction in a few important areas — and that if not, they could face disaster as their volume of value-based payment share grows. The thing is, getting PHM right is proving to be a mindboggling problem for many.

Let’s start with some numbers which give us at least one perspective on the situation.

According to a survey by Health Leaders Media, 87% of respondents said that improving their population health management chops was very important. Though the article summarizing the study doesn’t say this explicitly, we all know that they have to get smart about PHM if they want to have a prayer of prospering under value-based reimbursement.

However, it seems that the respondents aren’t making nearly as much PHM progress as they’d like. For example, just 38% of respondents told Health Leaders that they attributed 25% or more of their organization’s net revenue to risk-based pop health management activities, a share which has fallen two percent from last year’s results.

More than half (51%) said that their top barrier to successfully deploying or expanding pop health programs was up-front funding for care management, IT and infrastructure. They also said that engaging patients in their own care (45%) and getting meaningful data into providers’ hands (33%) weren’t proving to be easy tasks.

At this point it’s time for some discussion.

Obviously, providers grapple with competing priorities every time they try something new, but the internal conflicts are especially clear in this case.

On the one hand, it takes smart care management to make value-based contracts feasible. That could call for a time-consuming and expensive redesign of workflow and processes, patient education and outreach, hiring case managers and more.

Meanwhile, no PHM effort will blossom without the right IT support, and that could mean making some substantial investments, including custom-developed or third-party PHM software, integrating systems into a central data repository, sophisticated data analytics and a whole lot more.

Putting all of this in place is a huge challenge. Usually, providers lay the groundwork for a next-gen strategy in advance, then put infrastructure, people and processes into place over time. But that’s a little tough in this case. We’re talking about a huge problem here!

I get it that vendors began offering off-the-shelf PHM systems or add-on modules years ago, that one can hire consultants to change up workflow and that new staff should be on-board and trained by now. And obviously, no one can say that the advent of value-based care snuck up on them completely unannounced. (In fact, it’s gotten more attention than virtually any other healthcare issue I’ve tracked.) Shouldn’t that have done the trick?

Well, yes and no. Yes, in that in many cases, any decently-run organization will adapt if they see a trend coming at them years in advance. No, in that the shift to value-based payment is such a big shift that it could be decades before everyone can play effectively.

When you think about it, there are few things more disruptive to an organization than changing not just how much it’s paid but when and how along with what they have to do in return. Yes, I too am sick of hearing tech startups beat that term to death, but I think it applies in a fairly material sense this time around.

As readers will probably agree, health IT can certainly do something to ease the transition to value-based care. But HIT leaders won’t get the chance if their organization underestimates the scope of the overall problem.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

Categories