As the U.S. healthcare landscape transforms and value-based care and other alternative payment models take root, the need to improve the health and care of individuals and subsequently populations of individuals becomes all the more acute. This is why more healthcare organizations are launching population health management programs and investing in technologies to support these programs.
“Providers should get ready to make changes to effectively manage their patient populations as pressure is mounting to shift from a fee-for-service to a value-based care model,” said Dr. Adrian Zai, clinical director of population informatics in the laboratory of computer science at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Performance measurement and quality reporting will occur at the level of entire medical groups or healthcare organizations. This means, at the clinical level, population health management will focus on the primary care doctor, or the patient-centered medical home, a fundamental component of an accountable care organization.”
Zai will be among the 34 speakers at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Pop Health Forum April 3 to 4, 2017 in Boston. MobiHealthNews is also an organizing partner. (Register here to sign up for this event).
Harvard health economist Katherine Baicker, another speaker, knows the impact of politics on health care policy. She is a leader of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a study that examines the effects of expanding Medicaid coverage. In her Pop Health Forum opening keynote address, titled “Can We Have Slower Spending Growth and Better Healthcare,” she will discuss how the experiment found that covering the uninsured increased the use of health care, including primary care, hospitalizations and emergency room visits; diminished financial strain on patients; and reduced depression.
The study’s findings have been interpreted in very different ways. Proponents of the Affordable Care Act say it proves that Medicaid expansion generates valuable improvements in Americans’ health. Opponents argue that it proves that the cost of expanding Medicaid far outweighs the benefits. In her address, Baicker will examine where the ACA succeeded and failed, what healthcare executives can learn from the Oregon Experiment, and what she considers key to delivering better health for the money being spent.
David Chou, chief information and digital officer at Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas, will deliver a keynote on leadership and the role of CIOs and chief digital offers. Chou will discuss how as healthcare adopts new business models and responds to new competitive and market forces, technology leaders must adapt by developing a set of powerful new skills, mindsets and work styles that help both themselves and their organizations nurture a more digital sensibility.
Chou works at one of the leading children’s hospitals in the nation and he will examine the technology requirements to support a digital future and fundamental principles required for consumer-driven healthcare.
In the third of the Pop Health Forum’s three keynote addresses, “How to Make Hospital Innovations Routine,” Dr. Leora Horwitz, founding director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science at New York University Langone Medical Center, will discuss how to use academic research to improve care, outcomes and patient safety while addressing real-world healthcare delivery challenges like reducing readmissions, clinician communication and patient follow-ups.
Horwitz is an associate professor in the departments of population health and medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. And she is a director of the division of healthcare delivery science in the department of population health at the New York University School of Medicine. Horwitz earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School.
The Pop Health Forum will be held April 3-4, 2017, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston. Register here.
