Intermountain's Bold Population Health Move

With regard to population health—what broad, strategic and IT learnings have you accumulated so far as an integrated health system?

You almost can’t separate the strategic and IT learnings. And the ability to do population health at an organization like Intermountain Healthcare, because of the availability and longevity of data, allows us to do this at a certain level. I wrote a paper in 2000 when I was at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, with Ed Wagner and others, on population health. Basically, what you’re trying to do with population health is to use largely clinical epidemiological techniques to be able to understand patterns and flows within the patient population, and that information can then be used in multiple ways, including in better designing healthcare delivery. We know that a very small percentage of the population tend to use the most resources. They tend to have three or more chronic conditions, and it does not matter which three or which came first, and that includes mental health, which is why we added depression. We know, for instance, that two-thirds of our diabetes patients have a co-morbidity of depression. And population health, with this kind of information, can help us target specific care delivery interventions, and keep them out of unnecessary admissions to the hospital and unnecessary ED visits.

What do you hope to happen in the next few years with the contract?

I hope that the tracks that we’ve laid and the plans we’ve put in place will be put into action with our SAO. We’ve made a lot of progress in these areas, but not to the full degree we’d like. These funds will be pivotal in that process. And one of the roles we play is that we are a model learning organization, and we can show what’s possible.

Besides your own health plan, would you be working with others on your SAO?

With Medicaid, and also with other local health plans. And there’s an award for community engagement, and I’m the director of our community engagement program here, and I’ve been working on more actively engaging patients on how to better improve the quality and safety of the care we deliver.