Hospital leaders are increasingly looking for unified platforms that can measure activities, outcomes and performance, according to a Black Book report.
For the report, Black Book surveyed 140 CIOs, 159 CFOs and 448 hospital managers about their population health initiatives that have been deployed or will go into effect within the next 12 months.
Here are five things to know about hospital leaders' thoughts on health IT and population health.
1. The majority of respondents — 90 percent — said future population health management systems will be used as next-generation patient accounting systems.
2. Many leading EMR vendors — namely Epic, Allscripts and Cerner — have noted this trend and are transitioning their fee-for-service platforms into population health management services.
3. Health IT vendors outside of the EMR space — like Optum, Philips and IBM — are also developing services in the population health management market.
4. Some technology companies — such as Livongo, Fitbit and Apple, among other remote monitoring products — are directly targeting consumers with health services.
"There is an overriding potential of the [Internet of Things] to integrate wearables into patient portals, EMRs and PHM solutions," said Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book Research.
5. To effectively manage population health, hospital leaders will need to bring together all of this disparate data. Black Book suggested leveraging existing interoperability networks, like Carequality and CommonWell.