Apr 7
2015
HIMSS15 Trade Show Vendor Highlight: Forward Health Group
In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
Forward Health Group provides data and analytics services through PopulationManager, a web-based engine that leverages an organization’s existing technology and data from any source — EHR, claims, labs and more — to identify gaps in care for patient populations critical to practice and quality improvement teams. Any data. Any EHR. Any vendor. Any format. Even the really messy stuff.
About Statement
Founder’s Story
Michael Barbouche is a mathematician trained in health services with more than 20 years experience slogging through messy disparate data of all sorts. In 2004, Michael was tapped to help build a system to collect and analyze patient data for the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), an ongoing initiative that publicly reports on healthcare quality and affordability in the state, based on information shared by healthcare providers, insurers, and other stakeholders. Add his wife, a frustrated internist at a major health system who couldn’t get an accurate patient list to work from, and the rest is history.
Market Opportunity
The healthcare industry is moving from a fee-based model to value-based health care, which requires metrics on managing the health of populations. Population health management only works if the data is accurate and trusted by care teams.
Services and Products Offered
Forward Health Group enables health care teams and systems to drive outcomes by giving them the tools to:
- Evaluate individual patients
- Identify the most at-risk patients
- Determine outlier patients
- Compare physician performance
- Create action lists so care teams work from the same place
- Analyze system and clinic performance
- Measure system performance versus incentives
Problem Solved
Unlocking and giving access to data that care teams can trust.
Value Proposition
Forward Health Group gives clinicians information they want and need but could never access. When they (and their teams) can leverage this information to do the job they were born to do, patients will be healthier, quality will go up and costs will go down. That’s where everyone is trying to go.
Key Messages
The data needed to measure outcomes already exists in numerous platforms and Forward Health Group helps you leverage it in just eight to 12 weeks. Traditional IT approaches, like data warehouses and business intelligence platforms, are not solving problems, but wasting valuable time and dollars.
Forward Health Group helps lift the burden of reporting requirements by preparing exactly what you need. We take it a step further to decipher through all the madness to select, create, or invent the quality/financial measures that actually matter to you, your fellow clinicians and your patients.
Booth Number
Forward Health Group can be found at booth number 5052, next to the American Heart Association (booth 5053), showcasing The Guideline Advantage, a quality improvement program powered by PopulationManager.
Key Executives at Conference
- Michael Barbouche, founder & CEO
- John Studebaker, chief medical officer
- Jeff Thomas, MS, chief technology officer
- James Mattes, chief revenue officer
- Laura Kreofsky, MHA, MBA, PMP, CPHIMS, director of client services
Clients Served
Forward Health Group’s customers are hospitals, health systems, health plans and large organizations like the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association and American Medical Association, which use the company’s software to run national improvement programs.
Selling Proposition
Whether we work with a one doc practice or a big health system, PopulationManager helps move the needle by making data more powerful. Sure, it can help you check the boxes to comply with national standards, but it also allows you to create measures based on your own internal requirements. PopulationManager sets the stage to deliver accurate data directly to your physicians who can make better-informed decisions while in the trenches. It allows you to track performance on a system, clinic or physician level complete with a summary of financial impact. And you can easily demonstrate the results to payors, patients and the community-at-large. We think that’s pretty cool.
Founded
2009
Number of full-time employees
Forward Health Group has 35 full-time employees consisting of a diverse team of mathematicians, physicians, security experts, data analysts, information technologists, project managers and strategic business advisors.
Headquarters
Madison, Wisconsin
Booth Bait (Swag) Offered
Really cool flashlights that help you focus on the data you need.
Number of Previous HIMSS Conference Appearances
One
Specific Reason for Attendance
It’s an opportunity to showcase how efficient population management can be when working with collaborators that have the same goal of improving health outcomes and fixing healthcare.
Industry Outlook (most important trend, topic or challenge the organization faces)
The healthcare industry is in a tremendous period of change—quality and performance and efficiency will be critical components that must be measured. We enable clinicians and administrators with the data they need to navigate in this changing landscape, but changing organizational culture, building new systems of care, and aligning incentives will be a tremendous challenge. We view our job—the data, the measurement, the reporting—as the easy work. The hard work will still fall on the practices.