During a session at Becker’s Hospital Review 5th Annual Meeting, May 16 in Chicago, a group of healthcare leaders gathered to discuss their population health strategies with health IT vendor athenahealth.
Of the group of 34 leaders, 86 percent said they were participating in some type of value-based reimbursement model. The group was also very confident in their abilities to succeed under payment models that tied reimbursements to keeping populations healthy — more than 90 percent reported having the competencies needed to win at fee-for-value.
However, the leaders did see areas for improvement, including the need to better engage physicians in the use of the organizations’ IT platforms, overall data management and analytic capabilities and patient activation strategies.
Moving to true population health management will also mean embracing non-traditional care settings that are increasingly being used by patients, said Gregory Bazylewicz, MD, chief network development officer at Burlington, Mass.-based Lahey Health. “Physicians hate to admit it but people go to CVS [MinuteClinics],” he said. It’s important for hospitals and health systems to engage with these new care sites “because we’ll need those details about their patient histories,” he said.
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