Introducing the Health Catalyst Population Health Foundations Solution: A Data- and Analytics-first Approach to PHM

As healthcare costs continue to soar, organizations ranging from health systems to large employers increasingly assume a greater share of the financial risk for managing the health of populations. Most of these organizations, however, struggle to attain the optimum balance of high-quality care and cost containment—the building blocks of success in the new world of value-based care (VBC).

Population Health Foundations Solution Delivers Real Results

With its industry-leading data- and analytics-first approach, Health Catalyst® delivers real population health success by drawing on a wealth of data sources, domain knowledge, and adaptable tools and applications to lay the groundwork for a modern, data-enabled, digital healthcare system that is equipped to take on risk for the populations it serves. This approach is designed to accommodate the full breadth and complexity of an organization’s population health needs today—and to allow organizations to adapt and evolve their data and analytics investments to meet emerging needs in the decades to come.

The Population Health Foundations solution draws on integrated claims and clinical data, and provides essential, extensible tools and machine-learning capabilities for optimizing results in value-based risk arrangements. Accompanying solution services ensure that the strategic value of data is maximized to improve performance in risk contracts— and provide side-by-side subject matter expert partnership for establishing short- and long-term goals for population health management.

As organizations target specific improvement opportunities and grow in their ability to respond to the unique needs of their populations, the Population Health Foundations solution provides a solid basis of data and analytics on which to build with additional Health Catalyst technology in the future.

Built on Health Catalyst’s foundational technology and supported by the nation-wide experience and perspective of its experts, the Population Health Foundations solution also helps organizations leverage multiple data sources to understand their patient populations and create meaningful views of financial and clinical quality performance. With a flexible starter set that organizations can build on based on their needs, the solution compensates for the known failures of “black box” population health applications that, by not revealing the “why” of analytics insights, exacerbate the challenges of transforming quality, cost, and care delivery.

Delivering the Essentials for Success

The Population Health Foundations solution delivers the following essentials for success under value-based risk arrangements:

• Claims and clinical data to provide a comprehensive, cross-continuum view of each patient and the care they are receiving.
• Flexible, transparent tools for ad hoc analysis to open the black box of PHM analytics and provide fast access to deeper insights.
• Web-based patient stratification and registry building that start with predefined PHM populations, standard risk scores, and machine learning models. The Population BuilderTM: Stratification Module exports these population-health focused elements directly into their analytic environment.
• Quality and financial performance metrics combined into a single executive dashboard to allow clients to choose, measure, track, and manage the metrics that matter most for success in their contracts.
• Side-by-side partnership with population health experts provides access to the experience of team members with diverse backgrounds in value-based care to maximize the value of client data and gain strategic insights for future direction.
• Broader population health needs with the ability to integrate and add other Health Catalyst tools onto the Foundation, including tools to support:
  • Contract performance modeling.
  • Measures and care gap analysis.
  • Care management workflow support.
  • Risk adjustment and hierarchal condition category (HCC) coding gap identification.
  • Cost accounting and management.
  • Care variation analysis.
  • Patient safety identification and reporting.

With its breadth and depth of data sources and analytic expertise, Health Catalyst is uniquely capable and experienced in providing the data, analytics, and services required for success in PHM. The company’s cloud-based data platform, the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™), derives data from 125 million patients served by over 5,000 clinics and 500 hospitals. DOS integrates 40 trillion facts comprising clinical, molecular, and financial data elements from over 300 source systems, including EHRs, imaging systems, enterprise resource planning, and patient satisfaction applications.

The Population Health Foundations solution leverages not only Health Catalyst’s unprecedented data infrastructure but also the company’s expertise in helping healthcare organizations across the country use data and analytics to improve clinical, financial, and operational outcomes, as documented in over 150 case studies.

Three Common Problems Population Health Foundations Solution Solves

1. A limited view across the patient care continuum: Population health and risk-bearing models present a more challenging set of use cases than traditional fee-for-service models, requiring data aggregation, data enhancement, and data analysis. Many point solutions lack these capabilities. The Population Health Foundations solution aggregates both claims and clinical data to enable population stratification, registry creation, and performance monitoring across multiple care settings, with advanced dashboard functionality.
2. Singular point solutions: Healthcare is rapidly evolving. Organizations need to make investments that leave them open to future technologies and strategies that can accommodate the inevitable need for data integration and the specific insight their current circumstances require. The Population Health Foundations solution acts as an analytics starter set, upon which an organization can add additional relevant tools in a modular capacity, and over time, as their needs evolve. Gaps in HCC coding? Patient safety needs? Desire to identify clinical variation in congestive heart failure management? The solution is a foundation for organizations to build on based on their dynamic opportunities and goals.
3. Gaps in domain expertise: An effective population health management strategy requires domain expertise across multiple VBC categories, including clinical and claims opportunity analysis and prioritization, government and commercial payer engagement and contract management, and self-insured employer cost containment. Health Catalyst has a deep bench of team members who have led ACOs, CINs, and employer-sponsored plans, and who can offer services and strategic support to organizations with gaps in those areas.

What’s Next?

Population health work can seem overwhelming and risky, but the transition to value is imperative for survival as success is based on improved patient outcomes rather than volume. The Population Health Foundations solution enables payers, providers, and employers to execute on the population health work they need to be successful, with the help of industry-leading analytics solutions and a partner with over 10 years’ experience improving outcomes for the nation’s leading healthcare organizations.

Additional Reading

Would you like to learn more about this topic? Here are some articles we suggest:

1. Introducing Population Builder: Stratification Module
2. Why Patient-Reported Outcomes Are the Future of Healthcare—and the Key to Ruth’s Independence
3. Identifying Vulnerable Patients and Why They Matter
4. Care Management Analytics: Six Ways Data Drives Program Success
5. Measuring the Value of Care Management: Five Tools to Show Impact