BUILDING THE BRIDGE WHILE DRIVING OVER IT: THE ROUTE TO POPULATION HEALTH AND WELLNESS

I recently led a focus group at the CHIME 16 Fall Forum, where I was able to hear frank perspectives regarding population health and wellness directly from Chief Information Officers (CIOs) across the healthcare industry. While the group was highly optimistic about the coming transition to value-based models of care, when the conversation turned to implementation, the room got quiet. The truth is that we were all struck by a nagging, unwelcome fact: that for the majority of healthcare systems, implementing a population health management program with the requisite abilities to pull data from a multitude of organizations in addition to analyzing that information with a predictive analytics component — has become an all but insurmountable task.

Here are four elements that will need to be considered as we build the bridge to population health.