Insight Offered On PHM Analytics Vendors
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
A report from Chilmark looks at a number of population health management vendors and offers up its state of the industry.
The 2014 Analytics for Population Health Management Market Trends Report published by Chilmark Research explores “how organizations need to effectively leverage the myriad of data they have access to that will enable their PHM strategy, providing guidance as to where they should begin on this journey and the challenges along the way.”
The report examines overall market and vendor trends with in-depth profiles of 19 companies, data aggregation issues, challenges ahead for vendors, and what providers face as they enter the arena. “To date, providers have never managed global risk on this scale, leveraged such complex data sources, nor faced such obstacles,” the report opines.
Chilmark’s update to the 2013 Clinical Analytics report demonstrates “a market that, despite strong continued growth of interest, is still very much in its infancy as HCOs struggle with rapidly evolving models of reimbursement while vendors struggle to effectively build-out their solution capabilities.”
The industry serving the market is becoming increasingly crowded with new vendors entering the market every day. There are now almost 100 vendors purporting to serve the population health management (PHM) market in some form or another, many of them seeking to align their brand with PHM by any means necessary.
The author of the report, analyst Cora Sharma, sums up the state of affairs: "Vendors can be roughly divided into two categories: best-of-breed and platform-play vendors depending on their particular products and marketing strategies. It is currently a best-of-breed market, with providers adapting vendor solutions to meet a particular need created by a specific payment contract. Vendors aspiring to be become enterprise-wide platforms find 'enterprise-thinking' HCOs in short supply."
HealthData Management offers insight into the results of the report, writing, “The last 12 months have seen an upswing in vendors’ services offerings across diverse services categories: change management, PHM programs, physician behavior change initiatives, and data quality change management. The key concern is that downstream providers need much more help than expected as they transition to value-based reimbursement, with resources posing the biggest challenges. In addition, delivering solutions via SAAS rather than in-house installations has become the status quo, with even in-house clinical enterprise data warehouse/analytics being offered as a service.”