What is Care Management?

I recently joined the advisory board of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions, a leading provider of analytics, decision support, and workflow enhancement services.  At my first advisory board meeting there was a rich debate about the marketplace for care management and population health tools.  I ’ve spent years studying such solutions at HIMSS and found most of the products are “compiled in Powerpoint”, which is a very agile programming language, since it’s so easy to change…At BIDMC, we think of care management as two things*identifying a cohort of patients based on analysis of financial and clinical data*creating and tracking an action plan for that cohortWe built those core components into our self developed EHR some years ago.  The tools are in very active use to reduce readmissions and improve quality using disease specific protocols.Other care management services are very important, but we are happy to delegate development of such tools to third party cloud and mobile providers. Such items include customer relationship management applications supporting case managers, patient facing health coaching, secure patient/family/caregiver groupware, self management resources, and chat/tele-visits.In my experience, the hardest aspect of care management is unifying financial and clinical data from multiple heterogenous sources, linking the right patient records together, and curating the data to improve data quality.  Once such a foundation is availabl...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs