Are You Running the Population

Management Marathon on One Leg

By Jay Reddy
When you are working very hard and investing millions on
population care management programs and the results dont
meet your expectations!

Some population care management programs are successful
while some are not delivering the expected results.


The case study results we are going to share will show you why
there are winners and losers in effective population
management programs.

We hope that the results we share are not only going to be an
eye-opener but a game-changer as the healthcare providers
take on risk for population health.


VitreosHealth (formerly PSCI) has completed multiple
population State-of-Health (SOH) risk analyses for Medicare
ACOs and Medicare Advantage programs harvesting their EMR,
demographics and claims data.

Thanks to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for
they are the first payer in the industry who are sharing the
claims data with the providers for their patient population.


Our vision is that the case study below will compel all private
payers to do so if they want to be on the fore-front of healthcare
transformation.

The results we are sharing are a representative sample of what
we are seeing as a pattern across multiple Medicare ACO
customers.
A leading Physician-led ACO used VitreosHealth SaaS to
perform the population State-of-Health (SOH) analyses by
running the predictive risk analytics which leveraged both EMR
and claims data.

Our predictive models helped identify the risky patients, the
underlying risk factors and help design tailor-made care
management programs for the high risk cohort of population.

VitreosHealth uses a closed-loop provider-driven population process as shown in Figure 1.

VitreosHealth

received historical claims and EMR data for 3-

years (2011 2013) from the ACO for the Medicare population
cohort. VitreosHealth cleansed the data and ran the predictive
risk analytics algorithms to identify the clinical risk scores for
each patient.

The SOH clinical risk score is a composite of the individual
disease risk scores and is calculated from EMR (clinical) data that
includes vitals and lab results.
The top right quadrant (Critical) is the cohort of high cost, high
clinical risk score patients. These patients are clinically risky
based on the current state-of-health and are also high utilizers
today and account for about 42% of the total population spend.

The lower right quadrant represents the cohort (High Utilizers)
that are high utilizers today even though they are relatively at
lower clinical risk based on their state-of-health analysis using
EMR data.

Both these segments are typically identified through claims
analysis in most population and disease management programs
and become high risk candidates for care management
programs.

However, there is a far more important category of patients
which is the upper left (Hidden Opportunity).

This cohort comprises of members that are clinically at higher
risk today based on EMR data analysis, but have historically not
been high utilizers, hence are not identified by claims based risk
scores that are biased towards historical utilization costs.

In most cases, they account for only 10% of the total spend and
have very low PMPM costs, so most of these members are
ignored by CM programs.


VitreosHealth

performed similar analysis for Year 2011 1Q and

Year 2012 1Q to understand the movement of population over
the 12 month period.

Figure 3 shows the movement of population from Hidden
Category to Critical category and The Unknowns/Relatively
Healthy to High Utilizers during this period.
These similar findings which we are seeing across the ACO
populations are transformational for the care management
strategy development and execution. Most of the current care
management programs (See Figure 4) are focused on the
Critical and High Utilizers categories which make up 70% of
last year costs.

Our analysis points out, 44% of the costs in the following year
were coming from 17% of Hidden and Unknown cohort
populations migration into the Critical and High Utilizer
categories.


This means that nearly 40% of the costs by the end of the year
were contributed by members who were not being identified by
the current care management programs at the beginning of the
year and hence not being cared for proactively.
So your clinical teams are working very hard, investing millions
on the care management programs that are not focused on the
right members.!

If you dont put the right passengers on the right bus with no
Future Visibility, the population management journey will have
a destination with undesired outcomes.
Do you know who these 17% of population in the Hidden
category and Unknown category in 2013 that will be migrating
to the right by 2014 and making up 44% of new costs?

What are their risk drivers and what care management programs
to design for them?
This is why ACOs cannot drive their population management
programs using claims-based predictive risk analytics and get the
desired results.

For superior results, ACOs need to use Next Generation
Population Predictive Models that leverage multiple data sources
EMR, claims and demographics to help identify the high risk
patients and design tailor-made care management programs.