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Managing population health takes on a new look

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Anne Paxton

April 2017—Quarantine, antisepsis, sanitation, vaccination. Over more than a century and a half, as these staples of public health have evolved, they have proved that stunning improvements in general health status can result from adopting broad public policies based on data and statistical analysis.

But just in the past few years, the concept of “population health” has been grabbing attention as a framework for strategizing more tailored improvements in patient care—with laboratory data as one of the linchpins of those strategies. Large health care systems and diagnostics companies, among others, are increasingly seeing the value of a population health approach to process improvement.

As experts in the field explain it, population health is similar to public health but addresses more finely sliced subsets of people receiving health care. Keri Donaldson, MD, founder and chief executive officer of Prescient Medicine, prefers the term “population health management” because it connotes action. Population health management is more targeted than traditional descriptive public health policies, he says, because it “provides for a comprehensive way to classify conditions and stratify risks or underlying health trends across multiple data sources into one analytic stream so we can determine which ones are influencing public health.”

Dr. Donaldson

Dr. Donaldson

After identifying populations at risk through laboratory and demographic data analysis, population health management makes it possible to focus resources on that subset at risk, he explains. “You’re really drilling down on interrelated conditions that influence health over the course of a life, and what systemic variations may influence those conditions.”

For example, a simple proactive public health approach might say women should be offered or receive age-appropriate breast cancer screening consisting of self-exams, annual physicals, and mammograms. “But the general idea of a population health management approach is recognizing that we are in a capitated environment with limited resources, so let’s focus on where the current system is failing. By determining gaps in the current system, identifying the patients who have a high likelihood of benefiting from additional re-sources—the ones who are at highest risk—we can design interventions that can help change the outcome before it occurs or progresses.”

“A good population health approach really tries to answer the question: ‘So what?’” says Dr. Donaldson, who is also medical director of Penn State Hershey Institute of Personalized Medicine. “You can see you have genetic variation that places you at higher risk for cancer, or you have under-reported diabetes, or you have 50 percent of the population that is not on statin but should be. But those are just facts or statistics. Population health allows us to address these questions, ‘What are you going to do about it? How do you change that?’”

Prescient Medicine is a predictive medicine organization that offers predictive intelligence, Dr. Donaldson says. “We believe that earlier identification of risk and earlier detection of disease leads to more informed decisions.” Early at-risk patient identification and surveillance, reduction in unnecessary procedures, early identification of changes in prescribing practice, and custom, multifactorial decision support are among the services Prescient provides.

A collaborative blood services module, which can overlay or be built within any LIS or EMR, is an early success, he says. “It’s been able to reduce the red cell utilization rate significantly—by 17 to 20 percent just in nonsecular trend analysis. If you take into account secular trends, the number is 30 to 40 percent. In a midsize institution, that’s millions of dollars per year.”

Haemonetics is a competitor of Prescient in blood utilization, but in other areas of population health management, “Prescient has no defined competitors,” Dr. Donaldson says. “We’re sort of a trailblazing kind of organization. If you look at comprehensive opioid solutions or pain management or pain control, not a lot of people are playing in that space. In addition, many people are dropping out of personalized genomics because they can’t figure out how to make it make money. I think 14 or 15 PGx labs closed last year.”

One way pathologists can improve disease outcomes is by looking for opportunities within the hospital or system to implement a rule in the electronic health record to better identify a patient population, Dr. Donaldson says. With its oral anticoagulation module, for instance, his group found that some patients at zero risk who should not have been on an oral anticoagulant were receiving it, while only about 80 percent of those at high risk were receiving it.

“So you ask, should we change how providers are interacting with patients? Send them a letter? Post flags?” The project leaders realized there was an opportunity to improve care. “So we’ve gone through and conditioned decision support on this idea. Providers receive a letter saying: ‘Is this a purposeful action? Are you purposely not giving that patient an oral anticoagulant even though you know they have an overall risk-of-stroke score of six?’”

Some areas in which Prescient has programs, such as the comprehensive metabolic panel, are contained within the lab. At one time, in a more basic laboratory information system, built-in rules would put a hard stop on repetitive ordering of the panel and halt testing at the point of receipt, Dr. Donaldson points out. “The lab would see that the order was for a test with a previously normal result within 24 hours. That violated the rule, and they would throw it out.”

The real source of expense is not in performing extra tests that waste only pennies, however. It’s when one of the tests is abnormal and is followed up with unnecessary workups, he says. In its study at a 1,200-bed hospital system, Prescient moved beyond the old LIS model to cumulative probability analysis. “If I have one normal calcium, how likely is it that the second calcium in a single admission is going to be normal? What about after two normals or three normals?” The algorithm set a time limit on how many comprehensive metabolic panels can be ordered within a day.

The result was a more than 50 percent reduction in the number of glucose and chloride tests ordered, 40 to 50 percent reduction for magnesium, 60 percent for phosphate, and 30 percent for albumin. Prescient is now implementing the next version of this algorithm (linking it to ICD, location, point of order, or indication) in its logic engine. Eliminating standing orders was another application of this same algorithm.

But population health can also relate to an evolution of lab information outside the laboratory, to the systems-based enterprise level, Dr. Donaldson says. “Our original work on areas like urine microanalysis was done at a 550-bed hospital. We modeled it using lab-stored specific data as well as some demographic data, but you don’t have control of decision support within an LIS or at the EHR level.”

“Our type of decision support lives at a data universe that allows application programming interfaces, and those APIs overlay any input or output. So the data may come from the LIS or the EHR, but [for some areas], you’re at a level outside the LIS.” For instance, for drugs of abuse and pain management—an expanding area for Prescient, which has active programs in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, and Missouri, with Illinois on deck—the customer base tends to be broad with diverse applications.

Closing the quality gap is the key for hospitals as well as insurers, and simply not performing a test is one way to reduce health care dollar outlays, he says. “For example, a lot of people close the quality gap on catheter-associated urinary tract infections [CAUTIs] by just not culturing these patients. We actually prevent CAUTIs from occurring by using high-sensitivity multi-parameter urinalysis. That gives you an opportunity to increase return directly with the insurer, or through partnering with Prescient customers, whether they are small mom-and-pop shops or a very large enterprise. If you chew through their data, you can increase return and decrease costs.” Depending on the desired outcome, that could be identification of diabetic patients, increased compliance with a statin regimen, or decreased length of stay for hysterectomy patients.

Prescient’s ability to address risk factors through population health management connects directly to its business model. One example: “One of the things that’s hot right now in psychiatric hospitals is if they define and treat comorbidities appropriately, they get a higher reimbursement. If they are treating a person for psychiatric illness but the patient also has renal disease, hypermetabolic syndrome, or an infectious disease, they receive more if the comorbidity is classified and treated appropriately. So as an analytics firm, if we help you define testing for that population or to classify disease better with the testing you’re already doing, Prescient’s value to the client can be directly measured with the increase in recoveries.”

As a long-time public health specialist, James Halloran, MSN, RN, CNS, FAAN, deputy chief consultant for strategy and planning in Population Health Services at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, confesses he might be a bit biased. He does see “public health” and “population health” as very similar. “There are certainly tools in the public health armamentarium that we use in population health, especially surveillance and epidemiologic procedures.”

But no one has a copyright on the term, and the VA’s model emphasizes that population health involves attention to nonclinical social determinations.

Halloran

Halloran

“Those of us who wear white coats and are very egocentric think that everything that matters is clinical: If it’s not on my chart or not in a field on my computer screen, then it doesn’t matter,” Halloran says. “But population health says there are a lot of [nonclinical] things that do matter.” Socioeconomic status, occupational exposures, geography, access to water, and access to food are examples. The VA measures, monitors, and identifies trends that affect veterans’ health and tries to find patterns that can “turn numbers into knowledge” that will help improve the health of veterans and their families.

Population health is an evolving science, Halloran says, “and the specific models and metrics have been discussed for years,” beginning as classic public health and strongly influenced by disease management models popular in the 1990s. A 2013 Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) report proposed a framework for quality measures in population health and used the term “social determinants of health.” At the VA, Halloran says, “Population health goes beyond the model of sickness care to understanding as many of the variables as possible that contribute to the health status of veterans.” Laboratory and pathology data are important, but they’re not the only part of getting to an understanding of veterans’ health. “So they’re necessary, but not sufficient.” Electronic data resources have been key, he adds.

Pamela S. Belperio, PharmD, has been working with the hepatitis C program in the VA for about six years. As a clinical pharmacy specialist for patient care services/population health, Dr. Belperio helps the VA roll out education for national initiatives and policy and works with the pharmacy benefits management group to make the medications available across the VA system. Her responsibilities relating to population health include national reporting on numbers treated and untreated, numbers tested, and numbers cured after treatment, all using the VA’s national clinical case registry and corporate data warehouse, or CDW.

Recently, each of the VA’s 18 VISNs (Veterans Integrated Service Networks, regions of roughly eight to 10 VA facilities each) put together innovation teams to map out a system redesign process, developing processes to improve the current state of care. One of these teams led by Ron B. Schifman, MD, chief of pathology and laboratory medicine at the VA facility in Tucson, Ariz., demonstrated what can be done with population health by reaching out to veteran patients who would benefit from HCV screening.

A patient registry was developed that included all VA-enrolled patients born between 1945 and 1965 who had no record of ever having been tested for HCV infection. This is the high-risk “birth cohort” population that the CDC and VA recommend for targeted screening. Dr. Schifman and his team, in collaboration with the medical staff, developed a patient notification system using letters that could be automatically created and mailed from a central printing facility in Sacramento, Calif.

“Based on the patient registry, a letter is triggered to the appropriate patients explaining why it’s important for them to be screened, and that if they have any questions they can call a certain phone number and talk to a primary care physician. Or if they want to go ahead, the letter can be brought into the various phlebotomy stations we have and they can use it as a requisition form to have their HCV testing performed,” Dr. Schifman explains. The population health team also uses letters because “not all of our patients have information systems where they can get secure messages. Many do, but we can’t count on all of them receiving emails, so we find that old-fashioned mailing system seems to be effective, and it also serves as a lab requisition.”

The laboratory team and primary care physicians collaborated. “We’ve sent out almost 8,000 letters at this point. Notification is automatically documented in the patient record by triggering a note informing the provider that the letter’s been sent,” Dr. Schifman says. Once tested, another automated letter is created and sent to patients with their results and, if needed, instructions for follow-up care. Patients who test positive are immediately contacted and seen by specialists for further management and treatment. About 35 percent of patients who received the letters have been tested so far. “We’ve had a little over one percent of the patients who have been screened test positive for HCV, and all of those patients have had access to care and treatment.”

The Tucson VA is now remotely managing the program to support HCV screening at other VA health care facilities such as San Diego and Albuquerque, with more on the way.

Interestingly, some of the patients who received the letter knew they had HCV (they were diagnosed outside the VA) but were not aware that a new curative treatment was available. “That letter prompted them to then go back and seek retesting and access to care at our VA facility,” Dr. Schifman says.

The initiation of a VA corporate data warehouse—a national, updated repository of data from the VA’s computerized patient records of all VA facilities—helped bring a change to the care of veterans with HCV, Dr. Belperio says. “Originally, our population health care group had developed and maintained a national HCV clinical case registry of everyone with a confirmed laboratory result or ICD-9 diagnosis. Providers at a VA facility can use the registry to generate customized local reports that could be used to assess and manage their population of HCV-infected patients. It can be set up so that every morning an updated report is waiting.” The registry data are used nationally to report metrics and outcomes that guide clinical care, she says.

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