Dive Brief:
- Not-for-profit Covenant Health, a New England-based healthcare system, is utilizing the MedeAnalytics' Population Health solution to gain insights into its 7,000 employees and beneficiaries. The data has allowed Covenant to tailor their health plan to concentrate on disease management for the health issues that members suffered the most, and to establish wellness programs impacting the system's overall costs, according to a company press release.
- The move came as part of the company's efforts to transition toward value-based care and to reduce rising healthcare costs, and is expected to save $1.8 million dollars this year.
- The initiative was also used to create a foundation that will manage data from multiple payers, third party administrators, and future patient populations.
Dive Insight:
The MedeAnalytics' Population Health solution provides a compelling angle for the use of big data in healthcare, claiming that it aggregates data on claims, digital records, and other types of clinical and financial data with the ultimate goals of improving health outcomes and reducing costs.
The potential uses include gaining insight into quality of clinical care, as well as insight into the trends in healthcare utilization and costs among different patient populations. MedeAnalytics notes that the data solution integrates with a wide variety of health information exchange (HIE) and workflow providers to provide a "comprehensive population health management platform."
The solution allowed St. Joseph Hospital, one of three hospitals within Covenant Health, to do two things, says CEO Richard Boehler, MD: design a plan that met employee's needs by aggregating and analyzing past trends, and create healthcare plans that cater to the entire network's needs.
"We see this as an important stepping stone towards our goal of having at least 50% of our payments—including those with commercial health plans and third party administrators—be tied to value-based models by 2018," Boehler said in a prepared statement.