Getting a Center for Population Health off the Ground

Obviously, an important part of population health is that term population, something that is not fragmented. How do you plan on linking the various communities in healthcare whether its public agencies, providers, payers, etc.?

That’s the $64 million dollar question. It’s easier for Kaiser or Geisinger, everyone is all in one building, they’re getting one paycheck, that’s how they’ve accomplished it. The ACO movement, the integrated movement, that’s what that’s about. Frankly, health IT is the virtual glue that holds these systems together. There will not be an integrated system without health IT, it’s impossible. We’re trying to take advantage of this information to provide methods and evidence of how we can develop a comprehensive population-based method. Our vision is big, but we hope to act on it, one piece at a time. As they say, think global, act local.

[Regarding the applications] Some of them include developing metrics of health risk and need. So whether or not you’re an ACO, or a public health agency, you know where you stand with your population. Another is using natural language processing to improve non-structured EHR data, and improving physician workflow. Another priority is the linkage of mHealth and EHRs.

What is DST Health Solutions providing to the Partners program? What kinds of companies do you see joining this – providers, vendors, etc?

We hope to be a comfortable place where the industry sees us as an honest broker, where competitors can collaborate with each other. We’d like to learn what the industry challenges are. We hope some companies will take our ideas. We hope they will convene conferences. We also have a big educational program, currently 150 students in medical informatics, and we think that some of that will be useful to our partners.

And we also recognize, this type of center, isn’t the thing that will get a lot of government money at this time. We hope to do grants. We very much feel industry partnerships is what will get it off the ground. We’ve modeled our industry partners program after an MIT engineering program. They have successfully learned from industry, invited industry in from sabbaticals, educated industry, tested things out, and if there are good ideas, they shared them. DST is a company, that does both financial IT, but also a lot of managed healthcare IT. We’ve had a partnership in another venture with them, where we’ve developed software that is used around world for case mix, predictive modeling, and risk adjustment.

We’ve been approaching a dozen other companies, and we’ve had good interest so far, and we hope to open it fairly broadly. We’re looking to healthcare IT and EMR vendors and mHealth, who fill like they want to push the envelopment in this field.