For the next five weeks we’ll be releasing pieces from our blog series: The New Normal: Covid-19’s Impact on Population Health Information Technology. What we know to be true about this healthcare space has been reinforced and accelerated. We’ll help you to discern the noise from the NOW.

Part 1 - Introduction

Population outreach based on chronic disease risk scores is more imperative than ever both to re-engage your patients and to boost preparation for the next Covid-19 surge.  Focusing resources there, particularly if latent until recently, will also allow you to move on to trending risk in populations sooner — more broadly understood to be required in surge situations — as well as to quickly pivot to whatever the next pandemic demands.

Provide the Needed Care

On return from lock down, your chronic illness populations need vital care more than ever due to missed standing appointments, delayed preventive screening, immunizations, wellness care, you name it. By prioritizing outreach and engagement of your highest risk patients by population you do the right thing to make the most efficient use of resources within your organization not yet ready to return to full capacity. You also catch those patients bordering on beyond-repair more quickly.

In approaching your re-start through a risk-based paradigm you will maximize improved outcomes given these challenging circumstances - at once serving your patient populations, your business, and your community partners.

Plan for the Next Bubble

Many healthcare leaders were heart broken to have been caught off guard in such a way that regular care to their highest risk patients had to be paused during the nationwide stay at home period. If you find yourself wondering if you could have done more to avoid such a scenario, leverage your disappointment to inspire your teams to build the tools necessary to be more prepared upon the next bubble.

Risk-based tools, specific to all chronic disease populations, are the singular data points needed when the time comes that half or more of your typical care team members are pulled to front line labor pools, forced to work from home while home-schooling children, or both. When (not if ) you end up depending on secondary and/or intermittently available staff to continue critical patient outreach and engagement— without duplicating efforts or dropping balls— it needs to be easy. Risk scores make it easy.

Plan for the Next Worst Case

And who’s to say the next bubble will be the same Covid-19 we experienced this winter and spring? Will it be a different strain that is exacerbated by or preys upon different chronic diseases? Maybe we even get lucky for a year or two - great! But what if we end up facing a more formidable, completely different foe in the years ahead? In either case, there is no longer an excuse for non-stratified populations.

As operations return to something closer to normal and a sense of relaxation begins to permeate the halls of our hallowed healthcare institutions, we’d all be wise to apply crisis mode mentality to risk-score swat team approaches ongoing in the background. Healthcare IT departments cannot rest on their laurels. Full stop. We simply cannot afford, for the patients, to be unprepared for the anomaly comorbidity indices the next bubble or pandemic places at our doorstep. We need to be the agile healthcare professionals we aspire and assert to be. We - you! - can be.

It Doesn’t Stop at Risk Scores

We all saw what happened in Northern Italy and New York; tragedy and chaos were met with sadness and exhaustion amongst all involved directly or indirectly. We must learn from those experiences. To think the massive resource utilization and shortages can’t strike your city at the drop of a hat would be a mistake. And that’s why healthcare IT solutions should not rely solely on scores to prepare for outreach and patient engagement, but to go a step further to real-time, trended data points.

This is where your college calculus or recent studying of Covid-19 graphs is going to come in handy. (You haven’t already forgotten the first couple weeks of lock down, have you?) Patients with medium and high scores trending up will be higher priority for efficient resource use than the same patients with scores still high, but staying steady or trending down.  It really becomes an efficiency at the margins play both within your organization but also beyond, in the way that you guide local and state governmental organizations in their activities. That’s right, as you know, healthcare is taking the wheel.

Trend-based prescriptive outreach

• Patients at high risk trending negatively - engaged with phone calls to implore them to stay home, come in, utilize resources, whatever the circumstances may necessitate.

• Patients at high risk trending positively - engaged via other less resource intensive communication mediums - text messaging, for example.

• Patients trending in the right direction or who are well - engaged via yet other means: patent portal communications, targeted messaging via email or engagement on social media to disseminate education and messaging. 

Of course it should go without saying, but all of the above must be coordinated with your front-line efforts too!

Governmental Guidance

Let’s face it, healthcare analytics are crucial to our government and public health departments’ ability to react quickly. Here are just a few ways that leading organizations are and/or are being asked to contribute to the greater public good during these critical times.

• Testing site location determination

• Healthcare resource forecasting to guide city and state distancing

• Overflow planning

These areas of input elucidate even more clearly the need for trend-based population analytics to align with what clinicians are seeing minute to minute . Healthcare is being looked to more and more, to lead in these challenging times – this is our opportunity to embrace our roles as as community anchor.

Summary: 

Scoring and trending chronic disease populations now will help to assure your highest risk patients who have gone without care of late get it most rapidly, that you’re prepared for the next wave(s), as well as that you continue to establish your organization as the community rock for the future. In the end, it comes down to preparedness, and we all have the very real experiences we need to inspire the change we understand more clearly now to be required for what’s ahead.

Thank you for reading. If this content speaks to you, please follow CJ on Twitter or LinkedIn to be made aware of future blog content when it’s hot off the presses.