For some reason in healthcare IT we like to go through a series of buzzwords. They rotate through the years, but usually have a very similar meaning. The best example is EMR and EHR. You could nuance a difference between the two terms, but in practice they both are used interchangeably and we all know what it means.
With this in mind, I was intrigued by an excerpt from Cora Sharma’s post on Financial Analytics Bleeding into Population Health Management:
It appears that “population health management” (PHM) just has a better ring to it than “accountable care” or “HMO 2.0”. Increasingly, PHM is becoming an umbrella term for all of the operational and analytical HIT tools needed for the transition to value-based reimbursement (VBR), including EHR, HIE, Analytics, Care Management, revenue cycle management (RCM), Supply Chain, Cost Accounting, … .
On the other hand, HIT vendors continue to define PHM according to their core competencies: claims-based analytics vendors see PHM in terms of risk management; care management vendors are assuming that PHM is their next re-branded marketing term; clinical enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and business intelligence (BI) vendors argue that a single source of truth is needed for PHM; HIE and EHR vendors talk about PHM in the same breath as care coordination, leakage alerts and clinical quality measures (CQM); and so on.
Cora is right. Population Health Management does seem to be the latest buzzword and for some reason feels better to people than accountable care. I guess it makes sense. People don’t want to be held accountable for anything. However, they love to help a population be healthy.
Coming out of 30+ meetings with vendors at HIMSS this year I was asking myself a similar question. What’s the difference between an HIE, healthcare analytics, business intelligence, data warehouses (EDW) and even many of the financial RCM products? I see them all coming together into one platform. I guess it will be called population health management.
To Cora’s broader point in the post, there is a real coming together that’s happening between clinical and financial data in healthcare. All I can think is that it’s about time. The division of the data never really made sense to me. The data should be one and available to whatever system needs the data. ACOs are going to drive this to become a reality.
