More Healthcare Organization Focusing on Population Health Management

According to a recent Digital Health Most Wired Survey, healthcare areas that have seen the biggest overall improvement are patient engagement, interoperability, and population health management.

“This change reflects an increasing desire for transparency (in care and in healthcare billing), telehealth and value-based care. Over the years, acute care organizations have also notably increased their overall score for clinical quality and safety (up 17.2 percentage points since 2018),” the report stated.

Over the past four years, the Most Wired survey expanded to ambulatory and long-term/post-acute care (LTPAC) organizations. Each year, an average of 2,200 acute care facilities across the United States are featured. Ambulatory facilities have increased their numbers to 33,829 in 2021, and LTPAC facilities have increased their number to 449.

Throughout the report, research indicates that the trends are generally parallel for acute and ambulatory care organizations, while LTPAC facilities seem to have lower adoption.

Examining improvements in population health management, participation in the field’s activities has remained steady over this past year, increasing by 1-4 percentage points.

The report highlights six different technologies used for population health management activities: data aggregation, data analysis, care management, administrative & financial reporting, patient engagement, and clinical engagement.

The activity with the highest adoption increase is tailored advanced analytics; however, advanced analytics remains not widely adopted among population health activities.

“Certain analytics tools are more highly adopted — specifically, analytics for total cost of care (adopted by 91% of organizations) and physician-level quality measures (adopted by 98%). Tailored advanced analytics, while less adopted overall, are growing in use,” according to the report.

Additionally, real-time analytics have also been increasingly adopted to create key metrics data for clinical and operational leaders as well as individual clinicians.

“The use of data-visualization tools and self-service data-visualization tools to deliver metrics information increased 3 and 8 percentage points respectively in the last year. Real-time analytics grew in adoption by an average of 15 percentage points, though it remains less adopted (by 10–20 percentage points) than other analytics tools,” the report stated.

According to the report, only two other population health activities were adopted by less than 90 percent of acute care organizations: use of social care networks for social determinants of health (81 percent) and full customer relationship management (74 percent).

The report explains that across population health activities, most organizations rely on their electronic health records.

“On average, three-fifths of organizations using multiple types of technology use their EHR and a third-party solution. Third-party solutions are used more often than EHRs outside the clinical setting (primarily administrative and financial reporting). Across activities, LTPAC organizations are much more likely to use homegrown solutions.”

As population health management matures across the healthcare industry, more organizations will look to adopt analytic practices.