From the January 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
• Real-time access to clinical analytics will drive provider behavior through a more prescribed set of best practices in clinical care. This is based on a patient’s condition and driven by analytics and insights, with the goal toward producing a higher quality outcome for the patient. From a provider perspective, there is more to patient care than population health management or electronic health record (EHR) data. It is also about the ability to see how high-stress life events — as when a patient moves, changes jobs, marries or divorces — may impact his or her health. This kind of new information is essential to high-quality clinical care, rounding up the patient data set. Yet, it is not available in most clinical decisioning today.
• The patient will inevitably demand more transparency on provider quality and procedure costs. High-deductible plans are driving cost awareness among health care consumers (in addition to the CMS-issued mandate to increase transparency). One area consumers tend to focus on is unexpected health care costs. During an emergency room visit, a patient may be examined by an out-of-network provider, driving up the cost of the visit. This is where providers can be proactive using real-time data analytics.
Regulations require providers to declare the networks they belong to. Once there is a common universal provider data set, it can be used by all downstream hospitals and facilities to inform the patient about the network status of a provider in question.
• Providers will take full advantage of the benefits offered by the socioeconomic attributes that are clinically validated and correlated to health outcomes. If a physician prescribing a high blood pressure medication can identify an individual as a non-adherence risk, the provider can have a sidebar conversation with the patient to incent him or her to adhere to the treatment protocol. This extra five minutes may make all the difference in the patient’s health.
The better providers know their patients, the better care they can deliver. The use of socioeconomic data to help assess risk is emerging quickly and will likely be adopted broadly in the next few years. This is why it is essential that organizations lay a solid foundation in data analytics and continually build upon it for the best possible outcomes in years to come.
About the author: Jeff Klein is the senior vice president of health care at LexisNexis.Back to HCB News
