On the final day of the 2014 Caradigm Customer Summit (see Day 1 and Day 2 recaps), we heard customer speakers say that it’s critical to show progress quickly on your way to the strategic goal of population health management. First, Virtua Healthcare shared how they used Identity and Access Management to improve clinician access to data. In one specific workflow, they reduced the number of clicks needed from 60 to 13, which will have enormous impact given how many times every day that workflow is repeated. Provisioning of new users that used to take days can now be done in hours. These measureable results have driven higher clinician satisfaction scores and built momentum for additional projects that will continue to improve security, HIPAA compliance and patient safety.

We also had a great panel of providers share thoughts and recommendations from their experiences with population health. Everyone agreed that prioritization is challenging, but essential because no one has unlimited resources. You need to show quick wins to your leadership team as you progress to an overall vision. Data consolidation is often a logical starting point and viewed as a major win by leadership because of the known complexity around that. After that, the data can start to have an impact and you can choose between specific initiatives that fit your needs such as streamlining CMS quality improvement reporting, automating care management workflows, risk stratifying your patients, lowering readmissions, etc.

The transformation to population health management is not easy, but the promise of rewards is great. The good news is that you will be able to celebrate many smaller successes on the iterative journey to population health. Dr. Edelstein, CMO of Elsevier Clinical Solutions said on the first day of CCS that he entered healthcare to deliver quality. That’s what population health management and our industry is ultimately about, which is a vision worth striving for together.

It’s been a gratifying three days at CCS 2014. I thank our customers, guest speakers, and partners who traveled great distances to collaborate around population health here in Seattle. I look forward to celebrating the new success stories and learnings at the Caradigm Customer Summit one year from now.