Dive Brief:
- 3M Health Information Systems is integrating its Patient-focused Episodes Software with Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management platform, under a joint agreement announced Tuesday.
- The combination will allow providers to see all of an individual’s documented conditions, rather than focusing on a single disease.
- This will enable providers to better define episodes of care, while analyzing costs and anticipated resource use.
Dive Insight:
The push for population health management continues and technology has enabled new initiatives to improve this kind of care coordination. 3M’s Patient-focused Episodes Software defines more than 500 episodes of care, from inpatient to outpatient and acute to chronic. It considers patients with complex health histories and comes up with risk-adjusted episodes that might benefit from analytics, officials said.
HealtheIntent’s enterprise data warehouse, HealtheEDW, will compare provider costs, support bundled payments and provide diagnosis-related groups or other classifications.
“An episode-based payment system that is designed around the patient is the next logical step in the evolution of health care payment systems,” said JaeLynn Williams, president of 3M Health Information Systems. “By creating a defined time period, individual clinicians work as a unified team toward a single, clearly stated goal — to carry each patient across the episode finish line as efficiently and excellently as possible.