Payers and providers are embracing population health programs, despite challenges associated with the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care, according to a survey conducted by KPMG.
For the survey, KPMG gathered responses from 86 people who identified themselves as working for a payer or healthcare provider during KPMG's webcast on Dec. 2.
The survey found 44 percent of respondents at payer and providers have a population health platform in place that is being "utilized efficiently and effectively," while another 24 percent are in the process of implementing a population health program within the next three years, according to KPMG. Only 10 percent of survey respondents do not plan to implement a population health platform and another 21 percent of survey respondents said their organization doesn't require a population health platform.
KPMG said 30 percent of survey respondents said the biggest individual barrier to implementing a population health program is aggregating and standardizing information from multiple sources. Additional barriers cited by survey respondents were stakeholder adoption (10 percent) and integrating with clinical work flows (10 percent). Another 34 percent of survey respondents cited "all of the above" which includes those barriers, as well as enabling patient engagement, funding investments, and selecting appropriate vendors as additional challenges, according to KPMG.
"The complaints about incorporating technology into clinical workflows are fairly common and have many doctors and others involved with care delivery dissatisfied with electronic health records and other tools," Todd Ellis, principal at KPMG who co-hosted a webcast titled Lessons from the Front Lines: Building your population health program – it's not as easy as it sounds, with Beaty and KPMG Partner Joe Kuehn, said in a news release. "This can be remedied by better training and incorporating clinicians into the process of selecting technology."
KPMG also asked survey respondents about value-based payments. The firm said 36 percent of survey respondents said some of their revenue is generated by value-based payments, while 14 percent said the majority of revenue is generated by such payments.
Additionally, 26 percent of survey respondents plan to enter value-based payment arrangements in the next one-to-three years and only 7 percent of the organizations do not plan to do so, according to KPMG. The remaining 17 percent of healthcare organizations do not require value-based payments.