Electronic Health Reporter

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

Forward Health Group was founded in 2009 and has since become the go-to health data and analytics partner for leading health care providers and organizations including The Guideline Advantage, an alliance of the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association. Large integrated systems and small, high-performing specialty clinics use Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager to identify and assess risk and drive meaningful, measurable improvements in their patient populations.

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.

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