Allentown, Pa.-based Lehigh Valley Health Network successfully built its own population health platform, showing the value of health systems creating data analytics programs in-house, PitchBook reported.
After committing to population health in 2014, the 13-hospital system created Populytics, a for-profit subsidiary that manages its employee health plan and EHR-integrated data platform, according to the July 2 report. Populytics built dashboards and visualizations with Tableau and incorporated performance analytics and risk scoring from Optum. The system can, for example, predict which patients have an elevated risk of developing ketoacidosis, a sometimes fatal diabetes complication.
Lehigh Valley found value in building its own platform because it could devise custom solutions along the way, hired the right data engineers and full-stack web developers, and had Populytics work with its healthcare providers to develop the system, according to PitchBook. The article pointed to Lehigh Valley's 2 percent operating margin in 2022, above the national average of 0.8 percent, as evidence the value-based care approach is working.