I just sat through an Xcellent webinar about CareXcell from Siemens Healthcare Its title was Population Health Management: One Person At A Time. Talk about tackling the right healthcare problems with the right technology! As soon as a link to the recorded webinar is available, I’ll post it here. In the meantime I’d like to post their definition of Population Health, one of the best I’ve seen, as well as highlight Business Process Management tech (BPM) specific content.
Providers examine the patient populations they serve and apply clinical evidence, analytics, and connectivity to engage, influence and coordinate care teams and patients in ways that improve care and reduce costs.”
I’ve written before about how important workflow technology is to closing the loop within health population management. I’ve written before about healthcare BPM at Siemens, plus how Siemens was one the first healthcare IT vendors to exploit process-aware information systems. The next couple slide fragments reveal BPM’s critical role to making population health management software flexible and scalable.
There are lots of folks collecting and analyzing patient data. What makes BPM-enabled health IT population health solutions different is that they go beyond static reporting, to drive real-time support at the point of care. No matter how clever and sophisticated your analytics are, if you can’t close that loop flexibly (so you can change with the times) and scalable (so you can deal with potentially millions of patients) you’re not going to succeed. This is what workflow tech gives you, both flexibility and scalability of closed-loop, systematically improvable, population health management.
Another reference to business process management.
By the way, Siemens Health IT uses TIBCO business process management. Siemens gathers patient data from disparate systems, normalizes it so it can be combined for analysis, and generates evidence-based guidelines. These guidelines are implemented as workflows that are automatically executed. Regulations change? Medical best practice changes? Change the workflow definitions being automatically executed!
When workflows engines execute workflow definitions, tasks are automatically pushed to the right people at the right time. Then they are tracked and escalated if not performed. BPM is like your mother, who you could count on to never, ever, let you oversleep for school. (Well maybe once in a while, just to teach you a lesson.) So, above you see a Transition Management: Self Care/Safety Management task assigned to a Mr. Fisher. It has a date, a priority, and a status, in this case “In Progress.” If it isn’t completed by April 20, 2014, someone is going to come looking to find out why not. If the task is complete, the outcome is recorded: successful versus unsuccessful and why. And this data goes right back into the analytics to systematically improve population health intervention effectiveness and efficiency.
Beautiful!
I’ve also written about the importance of workflow technology to patient engagement. Here the workflow system knows all kinds of things, such as what is the best way to contact the patient, as well as what information or tasks to push to them. The patient is another member of the healthcare team, to whom can be assigned tasks, which if not accomplished are tracked, escalated, studied, etc., just like for other members of the healthcare team.
I’ve been writing and presenting about workflow technology in healthcare for over a decade. And I am so delighted to see it finally getting the place in the health IT sun it so much deserves.
Kudos (again) to Siemens Health IT for helping bring true workflow automation healthcare.