Social determinants of health (SDoH) have a major impact on individual and population outcomes. Health plans are constantly striving to improve these outcomes and member experiences. By assessing social factors and addressing the challenges pertinent to those factors, payers can positively impact member-population health. A deeper understanding of factors that affect members' health can significantly reduce utilization and costs, thereby improving the overall plan performance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of telemedicine for all consumers, forcing healthcare providers to move care beyond the clinical setting. This means that stakeholders across the continuum of care have to ensure improved access to critical services and reduce cost constraints.

Healthcare organizations today are faced with a complex set of demographic, technological and economic changes, forcing employers to reconsider and revamp their approach to ensure comprehensive healthcare delivery. These changes are taking place due to increased access to big data and advanced data analytics, which in turn compel organizations to redefine the employee benefits experience. This means empowering employees to access and optimize this data to actualize a personalized, preventive and predictive vision of healthcare.

Navigating U.S. healthcare can be overwhelming. Even in the best of times, simple tasks like scheduling appointments and managing proper medications seem like obstacles to accessing quality care. With COVID-19, the situation has become much more challenging. Millions of people have been infected with the virus. Though we see many people recover, the pandemic has definitely added a lot of confusion and anxiety in already complicated care journeys for patients.

Healthcare in the U.S. is an expensive affair. A survey revealed that hospitalizations in America that involve operating room procedures constitute 29% of the total 38.6 million hospital stays, including 48% of the total $387 billion in hospital costs. Operating Rooms create a massive amount of revenue for the facility. However, identifying the characteristics and costs of OR procedures and equipment can result in high surgical turnover, along with reduced postoperative complications, enhanced patient-centered outcomes, and higher patient satisfaction.

Data is the new oil. It is available across hospital EMRs, labs, physician offices, and all possible real-world data sources. It is critical to access the right data at the right time for the purpose at hand. With ‘Patient-centrism’ gaining popularity in the healthcare sector, the spotlight has fallen on the need for a data repository, where all the relevant data pertaining to the patients’ medical history, allergies, claims, and more are made available in real-time. Integrating the patient data from disparate sources into a standardized format creates a patient-360 profile that makes it truly interoperable across the healthcare continuum for better care delivery.

Interoperability provides the opportunity to make a healthcare organization an information-rich, patient-centered enterprise in a value-driven environment.

With healthcare organizations digitally transforming their processes, there is an acute need for data enrichment and curation to fill the gaps, bottlenecks, and delays created by poor data movement and quality. It’s important to implement actionable insights from the available data. As part of the evolution, organizations need to revamp the data integration layer to improve data practices and enhance the quality of data, facilitating the life sciences industry to make strategic decisions supported by analytics and data-driven insights.

When combined with healthcare's rising costs, competition, and complexity, the shift towards value-oriented, consumer-driven healthcare is encouraging employers to rethink benefit plans. To remain competitive, employers are adopting innovative plans that simplify and enhance the employee experience while reducing costs for them.

One of the biggest challenges in managing population health is converting and delivering actionable information to appropriate resources. Defining patient populations is an essential first step in identifying opportunities for clinical improvement. However, this can be a challenging task. Registry Builder makes it easy for clinicians to find a specific patient population and turn the analytics into actionable steps that improve outcomes.