Dive Brief:
- It is commonly acknowledged that homeless patients tend to be conspicuous consumers of healthcare services. Aware of that trend, researchers have leveraged HIE data to study medical utilization by the homeless, according to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
- Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City hope to help reduce extraneous utilization of services by the homeless by using the HIE records to identify patients who may be homeless, as evidenced by their utilization patterns.
- "The use of health information exchange data enabled us to identify a large number of patients likely to be homeless and to observe the wide variation in registration practices for homeless patients within and across sites," the report stated in its conclusions. "Consideration of these results may suggest a way to improve the quality of record matching for homeless patients. Validation of these results is necessary to confirm the homeless status of identified individuals. Ultimately, creating a standardized and structured field to record a patient's housing status may be a preferable approach."
Dive Insight:
It may seem at first blush that using HIEs to track the homeless could be considered an intrusive, if not oppressive, way of studying the issue of excess care utilization. However, the issues involved are not that simple.
Unreimbursed care has a dual role in healthcare. On the one hand, caring for the poor is a noble mission undertaken by many faith-based and secular not-for-profits. On the other hand, both non-profits and for-profits would welcome ways of reducing the financial burden of such care. The report states up front that homeless patients "consume a disproportionate amount of healthcare resources." So, by reducing those costs, the industry could conceivably find new ways of caring for more people for less money.
There are several charities and public/private partnerships trying to examine this problem, but they tend to be pilot projects with small budgets. Seeing Mount Sinai in the game, using some innovative research methods, is a good sign that the industry will find new ways to manage caring for the needy.