May 16
2014
The Right Prescription for Effective Population Health Management, Improved Outcomes
Guest post by Diane D. Homan, MD and Adam Lokeh, MD.
As the healthcare industry unwraps the next phase of population health management (PHM), providers are increasingly embracing its promise to drive success with healthcare’s triple aim of improving population health, enhancing patient experiences and reducing costs. It’s a 180-degree shift in thinking for many providers who have been conditioned to long-standing fee-for-service models, one that will require a coordinated care effort and an advanced technological infrastructure to support decision-making based on the latest industry evidence.
As regulatory initiatives, such as meaningful use and value-based purchasing converge to up the ante on improved outcomes, the proactive premise of PHM will be critical to success. A foundational component to effective implementation of a PHM model is a clinical decision support (CDS) strategy that drives standardization of care based on best practices.
For Rush-Copley Medical Center, the first step in this process was deployment of evidence-based order sets and a complete clinical content management solution— ProVation Order Sets, powered by UpToDate Decision Support. The decision to leverage evidence-based order sets at the point of care has proven advantageous on many fronts, from supporting recent responses to public health crises to raising the bar on outcomes improvement and laying a foundation of accountability across the continuum.
Reducing Variation for Improved Response
Getting clinicians on the same page and helping them to adopt industry best practices in their day-to-day workflows is certainly a key element in bending the quality curve, but ensuring that variations are minimized in a public health crisis is absolutely critical to success.
A 210-bed hospital serving the greater Fox Valley region of Illinois, including the state’s second largest city, Aurora, Rush-Copley uncovered an outbreak of tuberculosis (TB) in late 2009 following two admissions over the course of two months. In cooperation with the Kane County Health Department, an investigation traced the outbreak back to a homeless shelter, which, in turn, presented a considerable challenge to containing the outbreak as the population was highly transient.
With evidence-based order sets and an advanced clinical content management solution already deployed to address standardization of care, the clinical team was able to quickly deploy a point-of-care strategy for identifying at-risk patients, apply isolation management tactics and develop collaborative efforts throughout the community to minimize exposure. The strategy was three-fold: 1) contain the epidemic, 2) provide highest quality treatment based on industry best practices and 3) avoid duplication of services.