Population Health

New research from Accenture, a professional services company, and HIMSS Market Insights found that the vast majority of U.S. healthcare executives believe equity initiatives are important.    However, only a little more than a third have a specific budget dedicated toward advancing equity agendas, said the research.   Dr. Ankoor Shah, a management consulting principal director and health equity lead at Accenture, discussed these findings at HIMSS22 in Orlando. After the conference, he touched base with Healthcare IT News about the research and how technology can be leveraged to push forward health equity agendas.   Q. What are a few top-level takeaways from the research?   A. Nine out of 10 healthcare executives see health equity as a top business priority, which is an important milestone. However, only 36% have a specific budget to drive those health equity agendas, thus revealing a gap between prioritization and realization.   Advancing health equity actually drives value across key business metrics such as patient satisfaction, provider retention, health outcomes and cost reduction.    By leveraging technology responsibly, we believe that health equity agendas can be advanced quicker.   Q. How do you see technology as potentially negatively impacting health outcomes?   A. Technology that excludes large segments of the population can exacerbate disparities in care access and health outcomes. For example, many provider organizations relied heavily on virtual health services – telemedicine and video calls – when the pandemic began.    However, communities lacking broadband connectivity and digital literacy were left behind.   Q. By contrast, what are a few ways technology can be used to catalyze health equity agendas? A. Technology can help generate insights into populations affected by health inequities.    For example, Accenture worked with the state of Ohio to combine multiple state-level data sets with publicly available information and applied machine learning techniques to identify women at the highest risk of having an infant die within the first year of life. This insight was then used to provide much-needed services to those families such as nurse home-visiting programs.   Technology can be leveraged to improve care access, quality and patient experience. For example, companies like Violet Health, Spora Health and SameSky Health all use digital health platforms to ensure that patients receive medical care that is both high-quality and culturally competent. As a result, patients have greater access to providers who recognize and understand their cultural background, needs and challenges.   Q. What are a few examples of concrete steps the C-Suite can take to push forward with health equity initiatives?   A. First, understand where the health inequities currently lurk within their health system. This requires demographic stratification of KPIs they already examine – patient experience [and] satisfaction, patient access, quality of care, health outcomes and cost of care. With a stratification based on race, ethnicity, geography, disability, et cetera, they can then examine where the disparities lie.    Next, implement sustainable programs and processes to reduce disparities, such as by standardizing treatment protocols and rethinking care delivery for a specific population.    It’s important to identify someone who is accountable for those disparity reductions, and to determine the financial incentive structures at the executive level to drive the agenda.   By taking this approach and focusing on reducing disparities of KPIs around access, experience, quality, outcomes and cost, the health equity approach actually drives core business value and significant ROI.   Q. What excites you about the future of health equity?   A. Collectively, it seems all of us in the healthcare industry are focused on bending the arc towards a more just health system, one where everyone has the opportunity to reach their optimal health potential.   We see this in several ways: 90% of healthcare executives prioritizing health equity, according to our survey; healthcare companies hiring senior directors to drive health equity; accreditation bodies such as NCQA developing health equity accreditations; and state and federal regulators increasingly focusing on advancing health equity. Now we just have to figure out how to work together, optimize technology to be a catalyst, and make health equity a reality.    .jumbotron{ background-image: url(https://www.healthcareitnews.com/sites/hitn/files/u2556/HIMSS22Jumbo.jpg); background-size: cover; color: white; } .jumbotron h2{ color: white; } HIMSS22 Coverage An inside look at the innovation, education, technology, networking and key events at the HIMSS22 Global Conference & Exhibition in Orlando. Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Twitter: @kjercich Email: kjercich@himss.org Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

Sam Rangaswamy, ZeOmega CEO, discusses the importance of social determinants of health to population health management.

Health system officials say the remote patient monitoring acquisition will enable more of its patients to "age independently, comfortably and affordably."

University of Utah Health, Regenstrief Institute and Hitachi this past week announced the development of a new artificial intelligence approach that could help improve treatment for patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus. WHY IT MATTERS Researchers from all three organizations collaborated to develop and test a new AI approach to analyzing electronic health record data across Utah and Indiana. As they did, they uncovered some patterns for Type 2 diabetes patients with similar characteristics. Those hope is that those treatment patterns can now be used to help determine an optimal drug regimen for a specific patient. University of Utah researchers had worked with Hitachi for several years to develop a pharmacotherapy selection system for diabetes treatment, but a lack of sufficient data meant that it wasn't always able to accurately predict more complex and less prevalent treatment patterns. It also wasn't easy to use data from multiple facilities, researchers said, because it was necessary to account for differences in disease states and therapeutics prescribed across regions. So U of U researchers collaborated with Regenstrief experts to enrich the data it was working with – enabling a AI-based approach that first groups patients with similar disease states, then analyzes treatment patterns and clinical outcomes. The model then matches specific patients to the disease state groups – predicting a range of potential outcomes, depending on different treatment options. Researchers assessed how well this method worked in predicting successful outcomes given drug regimens administered to patients with diabetes in Utah and Indiana. Their findings showed the algorithm was able to support medication selection for more than 83% of patients, even when two or more medications were used together. More detailed results from the study are published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Biomedical Informatics. U of U and Regenstrief will continue work on evaluating and improving the efficacy of these models, with help from Hitachi's health IT business divisions and R&D group. THE LARGER TREND While 10% adults worldwide have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, these researchers note, a smaller percentage require multiple medications to control blood glucose levels and avoid serious complications, such as loss of vision and kidney disease. For this group of patients, physicians may have limited clinical decision-making experience or evidence-based guidance for choosing drug combinations, researchers note. It's hoped that this new AI-enabled clinical approach can help patients who require complex treatment in checking the efficacy of various drug combinations. At HIMSS22 this past months, hospital CIOs offered their insights on how AI and machine are helping uncover hidden insights in EHR data. Artificial intelligence is increasingly proving its mettle for diagnostics and treatment as approaches to managing diabetes and other chronic conditions evolve. The American Diabetes Association, for instance, recognizes use of some autonomous AI applications, such as screening tools for diabetic retinopathy, and says they meet the standard of care. Meanwhile, health systems are finding new successes using telehealth and remote patient monitoring for diabetes management. ON THE RECORD "Based on our findings, future progress in techniques for developing models using data from multiple sources, especially when sample sizes of individual sources are small, has the potential to contribute to improved clinical decision support," said researchers in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. "At the same time, it is important to develop the infrastructure and processes that allow technologies such as distributed learning, which can provide predictive performance equivalent to integrating source data, to be implemented as easily as integrating models. Last, prediction models such as those we describe here should be evaluated in clinical practice regarding acceptability and impact." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.

A magnetic resonance expert at Siemens Healthineers discusses steps that need to be taken to expand access to the imaging technology.

Speaking at the World Government Summit 2022, WHO’s Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t be “the last” one the world faces. However, the global healthcare community can work together to better prepare for the future.

Analyst John Gordon sheds some light on a new study examining virtual care use among Medicare beneficiaries from March 1, 2020, to February 28, 2021.