Zealous for Wellness: How to Replace Hype with Data

This article begins a series that looks at useful measures of health and how the companies that promote wellness programs demonstrate their success. We’ll see measurements of objective outcomes, patient-reported outcomes, and what payers look for when they can’t get direct evidence of improvements in wellness. You’ll note, as we survey the wellness solutions and measurements used, that the leading organizations in this space are payers, not clinicians. I’m sure that doctors and nurse practitioners truly care for the overall happiness and wellbeing of their patients. But the institutions aren’t set up to make that a priority. Sara Shanti, a partner specializing in health care at law firm Sheppard Mullin, points out that by setting up various incentives that observers broadly group under the term “value-based care,” the payers are a driving force in the wellness movement. Research, correlations, and measures An article examines the clinical literature for about 20 different measures of wellness, and distinguishes wellness from related concepts: absence of disease, wellbeing, and quality of life. Jim Wallace, CEO of DecisionRx, points out that physicians are not usually equipped to collect measures of wellness, nor does the typical electronic health record (EHR) have fields to store them. Clinical effects are established by various forms of research: clinical trials, longitudinal studies such as the historic Framingham Heart Study, and...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: AI/Machine Learning Ambulatory Analytics/Big Data Clinical Communication and Patient Experience Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System LTPAC Telemedicine and Remote Monitoring ACOs Avanade Christiana Voelker Cli Source Type: blogs