How Data and Analytics Can Help You Achieve Your Population Health Goals

Robert Perkins, director of outreach services, Intermountain Healthcare

Physician liaison and outreach departments should focus on more than volume growth and instead use data and analytics to help hospitals and health systems achieve their population health objectives. That, in turn, will help make outreach departments indispensable to senior leadership as they work to guide their organizations out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, Utah uses data analytics, including artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), to identify physician referral patterns and trends, determine the best way to reach out to individual physicians and their staffs, and suggest the next best action (NBA) to take for each provider.

The outreach departments at Intermountain emphasized volume growth, but, warns Robert Perkins, director of outreach services, physician outreach departments that focus solely on growing volume could find themselves seen as irrelevant by health system leadership.

“As more of our business moves into a population health environment, volume growth isn’t necessarily the key objective. Volume growth experts can become irrelevant,” Perkins says.

Intermountain Healthcare is made up of 24 hospitals and 240 clinics with 2,000 employed providers and 5,000 affiliated physicians. The healthcare system moved from being an organization known primarily for delivering quality clinical care to one focused on prevention and overall wellness.

To align with this change, Perkins wanted to develop an outreach department that helped Intermountain meet all its objectives, including, among others, helping to manage clinical outcomes, manage costs, help improve well-being in the community, and increase volume and revenue.

Read the full story now: Cutting Edge Outreach: Think Like a Data Scientist

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