Population Health Management: A Value-Based Approach

Population Health Management (PHM) is a preemptive, data-driven approach aimed to improve the health of a specific demographic through the participation of a specified network of financially related healthcare professionals. PHM has emerged as a key priority for healthcare organizations as they gear up for value-based financial compensation and risk contracting.

Population Health Management Platform stratagems have advanced steadily over the years, from PHM 1.0 (mid-1990s) through PHM 2.0 (about 2012) to PHM 3.0 (2020 and onwards). PHM 3.0 has moved beyond insurers and providers to a marketplace in which PHM is a free and open application programming interface that integrates the whole care continuum.

What PHM Challenges Must Be Addressed?

Even with the PHM progression to 3.0, fundamental hurdles in implementing a demographically focused approach persist:

1.  Creating a clinically integrated network is critical for obtaining insights from the outpatient perspective. 

2.   Earning end-user satisfaction necessitates data analysis transparency. Effectively conveying the optimum strategy for a specific patient or demographic to an end-user (e.g., practitioner) involves insights traceability.

3.  Troubleshooting data accuracy and latency solutions aren't competent enough to properly gather, filter, and standardize data.

When developing PHM skill sets, healthcare organizations should evaluate a variety of elements, including informatics, care practices, and practitioner ethos.

What is the impact of Population Health Management on healthcare?

By researching the patient population and identifying the most appropriate and efficient ways of treating them, Population Health management Platform enables the shift to value-based care.

PHM allows healthcare transition by facilitating telehealth/telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and altering strategies and procedures linked with various levels of health risk. The goal is to reduce the population's vulnerability to an acute onset of treatment and chronic health issues.

Population Health Management evolves through the successful use of software for data acquisition, data management, predictive modeling, and business intelligence.

Obtaining and interpreting data helps clinicians to discover the patient population's most pressing requirements. For example, if a significant proportion of a patient group has a specific condition, such as hyperglycemia, hypertension, and the accompanying socioeconomic determinants of health. PHM enables healthcare professionals to forecast and evaluate patients at risk of hospitalization, design treatment plans, and comprehend the health patterns of the patient group.

In the face of uncertainty, healthcare organizations can move forward with Pop Health by adopting the standard practices of value-based care:

• Begin with Medicare Advantage, which offers enormous potential and little entry hurdles.
• Prioritize outpatient services over critical care due to cost-effectiveness.
• Employ registries to find influential participants.
• Concentrate on realistic strategies to relieve clinicians' stress.