Recent studies suggest a patient's social and physical environments may have the greatest impact on their health outcomes and overall wellness. Equipped with this knowledge, vendors and providers are now challenged with how to gather data regarding these social determinants from patients and then figure out how to incorporate them into their population health programs.
Population health continues to be an important initiative for healthcare organizations. Whether you're just getting started or are well along your population health journey, you'll enjoy hearing Rick discuss some of the more advanced initiatives organizations discussed during HIMSS17.
Watch the video to learn more, and if you'd like to discuss how we can help you advance your population health program, give us a call.
If you'd prefer to read, the full transcript is below.
Transcript
Hi, my name is Rick Shepardson, director of Optimization Solutions at Nordic. I’m here at HIMSS this week with a lot of our team. We are seeing that population health is as big as ever. There are a lot of different vendors in the space. There are a lot of providers trying to figure out what to do in the space.
As we’ve been having conversations, a lot of it is the same old, same old, stratifying your populations, targeting those patients where you can have the greatest ROI or the greatest impact.
One thing that is a little new this year that’s popping out is social determinants. We are seeing a lot of organizations that are trying to figure out first, how do you develop tools for patients to report this information?
They’re not called surveys. They’re called instruments. They’re not questions. They’re items.
Once you have these instruments that are developed, how do you get patients to actually fill them out and send them back to you? What type of incentive do they have? Once you start to collect this information from the patients, how do you turn that information into meaningful insights? How do you aggregate it with all of the other medical data? How do you make sure that it is sitting there alongside the medical care or the genomics?
There have been a lot of studies done recently, and social determinants actually make up the largest percentage of overall patient outcome and wellness. As providers try to figure out how to use this, they’re even moving toward the concept of software as a drug. Just like a provider might prescribe a therapy, they’re prescribing you use this app.
I think we’re going to see more of that as we’re starting to collect more social determinants like environment and family and pets and all these things. They have a larger impact on wellness than what anyone knows right now. As we get further down this population health journey, I think those are going to become even more important to be tracking and figuring out how to impact the patient there.
So I’m really happy to go along this journey. I hope you come along with us, and I look forward to seeing your next time.