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Why data is the backbone of population health management

Mike McQuaid, Sr. US Healthcare Strategist, OnX Enterprise Solutions

The population health management journey inevitably leads to a discussion of data.

How do you identify crucial data, gather it efficiently and deliver it to clinicians in real time to enable better care at reduced costs? Answering these questions forms the foundation of any strategy for making the transition to population health management.

Developing that strategy requires a three-pronged approach:

  1. Set Long-term Goals for Managing and Analyzing Data in Real Time Once your organization has agreed upon the ultimate goals for transforming care under the population health management model, you’ll need to answer a few key questions about data:
    • What data do we need?
    • Where is this data?
    • How should it be collected?
    • How should it be secured?
    • How can we make it usable for all stakeholders?

    When you have the answers in hand, the next step is to build or transform the existing IT infrastructure to create a foundation of comprehensive and consistent data (whether physical or virtual).

  2. Transform Your Data Center to Aid Clinicians and Manage Risk Healthcare organizations responsible for the entire episode of care require technology that can be deployed outside of the hospital setting all the way back to the home.The benefits of clinicians being able to leverage more usable data for decision making during the entire episode of care are fairly obvious. Yet there is another practical benefit: Enabling the management of business risk associated with an outcomes-based business model.
  3. Fine-Tune Your Data Hub to Support Goals Reporting on and analyzing the new hub of data helps your organization decide where improvements are needed, where adjustments need to be made, and whether the original goals need to be reevaluated.Selecting the right partners to take this journey with is not easy. As one of the largest enterprise data center partners in North America, our healthcare clients value the investment we’ve made in acquiring and developing healthcare specific technical expertise. As for OnX, we’re thankful for our manufacturer partnerships that give us the opportunity to ensure we develop the most relevant, appropriate solutions that make our healthcare clients better.

Here’s a recent post from one of our partners you might find helpful – it’s an Intel post about population health management best practices.