Mr. Vannorman explained how analytics can be integrated can transform a health system and help with decision making.
On the value of analytics related to outcomes
“To me analytics are great,” Mr. Vannorman said. “They’re wonderful. It’s wonderful to be a keyboard jockey and to be able to apply analytics in healthcare, but what Optum does is decision support. It is not decision making. Decision making is informed by this, but it’s also informed by working with our providers and caregivers and patients.”
“The analytics we do on behalf of our clients and our patients is only as good as the ability of our physician and caregiver partners to integrate analytics into workflows in a meaningful way,” he said.
“The other big takeaway is to make sure you use smart analytics to best spend your limited resources,” he added.” The way we bubble down population health analytics is: it’s all about patients and interventions. [It’s about] identifying whether those interventions are occurring [and if they’re occurring] as we expect them to and whether we are getting the outcomes we should get.”
Mr. Pederson said when Optum is looking to solve a problem in a health system, they approach the problem analytically through three ways.
“When [Optum] looks at these [problems] we look at a condition-centric view so we can focus on diabetes or COPD or even an ear infection, what have you,” Mr. Pederson said. “We can take a condition-centric approach and that’s one way to approach these problems.”
“We can take a member-centric approach, so we can look at individual patients, sometimes frequent flyers that are using the emergency room multiple times a month and several times a year,” he said. “We can take that approach and focus in on specific patients or numbers.”
“Finally, we can take a physician-centric approach, where we look patients visiting the ER and ask, ‘Do they have a primary care provider that they’re working with? Do they have a specialty provider they’re working with? And how can we coordinate care among those providers to keep these folks out of the emergency room for these potentially avoidable positions.’ That’s the concept and we approach it from multiple perspectives to create a surgical intervention,” he said.
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