Holding Healthcare Professionals Accountable with Better Systems and Better Care
Costs can become unpredictably convoluted in the healthcare industry. The balance between insurance payments, governmental institutions, direct pays, and everything else become a juggling act. There needs to be systems in place to organize this information coming from all these channels, and it needs to be streamlined properly to minimize data mistakes.
Watching the Population
Professionals have been asking, what is population health management? Population health management is a technical structure akin to a data warehousing option that collects relevant data in a large shared network. It allows easy access to many interrelated data entries. This will make information transparent and easily sharable between small community physicians to large hospital entities.
Population health managment increases accountable in the system where provider-led institutions can offer superior care while also being responsible for expenses and diagnoses as they relate to the entire network. For example, a physician can track expenses as they tie to patient data to find out if there are any aspects they can improve. If one office has 300 patients with a certain set of ailments, and another has 250, the medical costs related to the former should be marginally higher. This direct comparison holds entities accountable for their medical practices and finances.
The question of 'what is an aco?' is also common. For the record, ACO is the acronym for accountable health management, a sister process to population health management. ACO looks more at the financial caliber of the data, where the population systems look at patient organization and entry coherence.
Data Management and Obamacare
Data Management has become astoundingly relevant in the Affordable Care Act, which seeks to revamp the entire healthcare industry. The US Department of Health and Human Services has popularized and designed a set of guidelines to stipulate consistent data organization. These tie into the Medicare Shared Savings program. The idea is simple, in theory. The system attempts to unify large quantities of population data as it pertains to patients under the Affordable Care provisions and insurances.
Clinicians can take advantage of shared data to make more accurate diagnoses and to keep track of patient information for more accurate tracking. It can also help remove extraneous treatments where a specific patient is borderline taking advantage of their medical services and unnecessarily burdening community physicians.
