Lately,  the health sector has been introduced to several new challenges apart from the ones that already existed. Some health systems have been growing phenomenally, while some are being gutted because of decreasing quality and increasing costs. Hundreds of healthcare settings comparable in size and scale often have a huge gap, with some being way ahead, while some left so far behind that all they ever see are losses.

Emma Jones, 67 was diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes and morbid obesity five years ago and had always faced issues managing her HbA1c levels and morbid obesity. Her last test report revealed her HbA1c to be higher than the ideal and her obesity , barely controlled. Emma’s PCPs and specialists knew that the problem was related to her poor adherence to care plans and irregular follow-up visits. Apart from her wellness and health, the secondary concern for the providers was facing the growing emphasis Medicare had placed on overall performance and its link with reimbursements. 

The healthcare industry is swirling with health data, and healthcare has some significant strides in the past few years, right from genome sequencing and precision medicine to public policy and improvements in patient care. Yet the most-coveted, long-term goal remains to be realized- interoperability between health systems: a scenario where every healthcare system would speak the same language, information would flow seamlessly between healthcare organizations, and every organization, system, provider, and patient would have access to relevant clinical information at the right time.

The US healthcare is getting costlier every second. It is already over $3 Trillion dollars annually, which is approximately 18% of the GDP.  This scenario has changed the perspective of everyone about health care. Today, value-based contracts are defining the modern day healthcare. It isn’t about the quantity of the care anymore as much as it is about the quality of the care that is being focused on.

Time is money – an adage world follows. When providers realized paper medical records were time-consuming, Electronic Health Records were developed to make things streamlined. Early EHRs were only meant to capture basic clinical information, and over the time EHRs have taken the form of a digital version of paper medical records. In an industry as dynamic and as focused on value as healthcare, it’s not feasible to have physicians spend almost half their time on EHRs.

For a long time, healthcare insurance companies used to overlook people who were likely to be high-cost. As the landscape changed with new regulations, insurance providers have started offering new policies in the individual market without identifying any pre-existing conditions while enquiring about their health status. Even so, there have been many loopholes, and every administration has and continues to aim at minimizing these gaps. The One good answer thus far: risk adjustment.

Today, while moving from a fee-for-service structure to a value-based ecosystem, healthcare organizations find themselves managing fragmented patient care in a disjointed care network. Although the changes in the healthcare payment model and remarkable innovations in the field of healthcare technology have been prompting healthcare executives to change the way they approach outcomes, the journey to data-driven health outcomes is a long one.

Amid new payment models, upcoming technologies on a daily basis, and looming uncertainties in immediate future, ACOs find themselves dealing with some challenge or the other frequently. The idea behind bringing ACOs to the frontlines was to achieve high-quality patient care, bend the cost curve, and deliver better health outcomes across populations. At times like this, it’s paramount ACOs find solutions to counter the challenges coming their way:

The world of healthcare analytics is vast and can encompass a wide range of data that has the incredible potential to tell stories about health and healthcare delivery: right from individual patients to entire populations. Having numbers and an easy-to-use visualization at hand gives providers and caregivers the power not only to track the ongoing activities in their organizations. Simply showing visualizations are not enough and to fully understand their value, healthcare organizations have to take a few steps beyond basic graphs.

Race, gender, socioeconomic status have been known to affect a person’s health, access to care, costs incurred, and the outcomes. The defining conditions of how we live, learn, work, and play not only influences our health but goes on to define and impact an entire community’s health.