Fear of the unknown is the impetus behind many analytics efforts. Accountable care requires providers to go far beyond providing episodic care, instead actively managing patients and disease states. – Greg Gillespie  

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have the responsibility of taking on huge populations of new patients, improving overall health, and increasing patient satisfaction, which has many physicians asking a simple question: “how?” How can physicians take on thousands of new patients and moderate their costs without sacrificing quality? Healthcare IT Consultant Greg Gillespie of Health Data Management offers the solution: real-time data analysis software.

Gillespie outlines how Christiana Care Health System has utilized data management and analysis software to effectively treat their patients by relying on an “analytics engine to monitor real-time triggers—like a hospital admission or abnormal lab results—as well as frequent outreach to keep tabs on ischemic heart disease patients and communicate with caregivers.” Christiana Care CMIO Terri Steinberg gives credence to the use of strong analytics:

We’re better off [sic] having a machine determine what the factors are, instead of assuming we know them, and analyze who in this huge population is likely to require additional services, and more importantly, why they would need them … We are going to need to make clinical decisions about people without knowing very much about their healthcare, and machine-generated predictive models are going to give us insights about what these patients need.

Through the utilization of real-time analytics, Christiana Care has empowered its physicians to move from simply treating patient symptoms to more accurately assessing risk and providing appropriate care to the patient before symptoms occur.

As Christiana Care and many other organizations have discovered, real-time data analysis software offers ACOs an instantaneous account of complex data, providing the ability to make decisions with confidence and to drive process improvement. Salient’s ACO solution provides clinicians and care managers with the data they need to coordinate patient care for better outcomes while facilitating managerial vigilance over performance against ACO incentive goals.

Learn more by visiting our Salient ACO website and download Greg Gillespie’s full article here.

Patient Population Management