Population Health
With most patient data now being recorded in a shareable form, we're poised to accelerate population health IT. Now it's on to the next set of major challenges, which will be front-and-center at HIMSS15: sharing data and putting it to beneficial use.
Joseph Kvedar, MD, recently wrote about the sign posts on the road to connected health adoption. Here, he outlines the connected health sign posts that are driving the change in attitude from "healthy skeptic" to "fear of missing out."
Population health, Big Data, predictive analytics and all that massive computing power help to improve health. But care still has to be delivered, and it will probably still be one patient and one caregiver at a time: a population of two.
Until recently, technology-enabled efforts to improve population health relied heavily on the use of claims data alone. While there is evidence this approach has merit, there is also a new opportunity to take these efforts to the next level.
With all the talk of population health, interoperability and personalized medicine, you would think we have already solved the problem of how we handle all the clinical information for a single patient at the point of care. We have not.
Realizing the return on investment from implementations of population health management technologies can take years. But there are approaches to optimizing programs for an earlier ROI.
