New HIMSS Analytics Essentials Brief Highlights Population Health Initiatives Evolving In Healthcare Heading Into 2017

HIMSS Analytics has released its most recent 2016 Essentials Brief: Population Health Study, which provides a high level view of how healthcare organizations, in moving from a volume to value-based care, are incorporating population health initiatives and leveraging their IT infrastructure to improve outcomes. Essential Briefs are market research studies focused on identifying salient topics in the healthcare IT space that highlight mind share, market share and market opportunity of specific healthcare software technologies.

Population health is a model of care where healthcare organizations focus their efforts on improving healthcare outcomes for a defined population, generally in a specific location. While many organizations have indicated they employ programs and initiatives around population health, leveraging current IT infrastructure and producing tangible outcomes has proven to be difficult. Despite this, the study indicated organizations are gradually taking on more risk as the level of patients under risk contracts shifted from lower to higher percentages.

“It is encouraging to see the level of population health programs and initiatives increase in 2016 from our previous 2015 study,” says HIMSS Analytics Director of Research, Brendan FitzGerald. “However, organizations still face challenges with these programs on a number of levels, including data and solution integration, knowledge and expertise, and cost of sustaining these programs long term. Performing population health is still in its infancy and it will take time for many organizations to work out a sustainable and effective approach.”

The 2016 Population Health Essentials Brief offers insight from 104 hospital executives (C-Suite) and Vice Presidents and Directors of IT, clinical systems and clinical analytics on their current approach toward population health, their areas of focus, their IT approach and the challenges they are encountering along the way. Additional insight is provided through data from HIMSS Analytics LOGIC, the most comprehensive and intuitive global market intelligence tool in healthcare IT. LOGIC provides adoption rates on specific technologies which could complement the move toward precision medicine, including molecular diagnostics solutions, laboratory outreach services and specimen collection management solutions.

Highlights of the 2016 study include:

• Current and future adoption of population health programs and initiatives
• Population health solution and vendor use snapshot
• Current challenges study respondents face in their approach to population health
• Advances study respondents would like to see from IT vendors that could impact their population health strategy

Click here (http://www.himssanalytics.org/news/six-degrees-of-population-health?utm_source=meltwater&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=2016pophealth) for more information and a free Snapshot Report of the 2016 HIMSS Analytics Population Health Study.