It’s always enjoyable to be at the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference, which kicked off today in Chicago. The sheer volume of people (around 38,000+) who come from all over the world to learn about and discuss innovation in healthcare is amazing, and makes HIMSS the industry gathering.

Caradigm had a bustling opening day in the exhibition hall as we hosted the first two of a series of outstanding interactive panel sessions to be held in our booth this week. Here are the highlights from today’s panels:

Population Health Trends and Insights Panel

Panelists were Ken Kleinberg, Senior IT Analyst from The Advisory Board Company, Dr. Peter Edelstein, Author and Patient Advocate, Brian Drozdowicz, Caradigm SVP of Global Population Health and Patty Enrado, Senior Editor, HIMSS Media who served as the moderator. To initiate discussion among the panelists, Patty shared preliminary results from a HIMSS Analytics population health research study and asked the panelists to respond. It was a lively discussion centered around where organizations are today with population health and where they are headed in the future. Some of the key points that came up in the discussion were:

• 22 out of 25 respondents said population health would be a high organizational priority by next year. The panelists agreed that we have reached the tipping point for organizational awareness of population health, but are not there yet on execution because population health is complicated and requires new tools.
• Respondents indicated that the top challenges providers are having are related to data aggregation, change management, and budget constraints. While the panel agreed that budget and resource constraints are common, providers can mitigate the challenge by honing in on programs and tools that can help them achieve quick wins such as data aggregation.
• Initial successes in population health are coming from a variety of different areas such as patient engagement and outreach, building IT infrastructure and care and case management. The panelists commented that experimentation with different population health programs is an effective approach until a provider learns what strategies are working for them. Aligning on goals and how to measure success is important to establish before implementing a program.
• To further mature population health strategies, respondents indicated that they need to keep bolstering their IT infrastructure, form more partnerships and affiliations to expand coverage, and be adaptable. The panelists talked about how providers should take the long view and build infrastructure that can scale. An ACO that manages a few thousand lives today needs a clear technology and strategy path forward to grow to hundreds of thousand lives managed.

Succeeding In Accountable Care Panel

Panelists were Wendy Vincent, National Practice Director Beacon Partners, Sameer Bade, Caradigm VP of Clinical Solutions and myself as the moderator. This panel was an excellent follow up to our earlier pop health session as the conversation centered on specific foundational strategies ACOs should be considering to drive quality and lower costs. Some of the recommendations discussed included:

• Start by obtaining a deep understanding of your population, and use predictive modeling to identify patients who are most likely to become high risk in the coming year in order to prioritize interventions.
• Build a strong foundation of primary care and patient centered medical homes (PCMH) that can help improve outcomes for a targeted population.
• Establish strong physician leadership in the ACO and also restructure physician compensation to align provider incentives with value-based care.
• Remember that you can’t manage population health with an EHR alone. As providers scale programs and form clinical networks, the amount of data that needs to be aggregated from disparate systems multiplies very quickly. Providers also need a higher class of population health analytics and workflow tools to help them drive results.

If you’d like to receive the complete research reports from the panels today, send us a note here. Also, check back tomorrow for a recap of Tuesday’s activities as Caradigm will be hosting three more panel presentations in booth #7307.