ActiveHealth Boosts Clinician, Patient Data

ActiveHealth Management, the disease, case and utilization management subsidiary of Aetna Inc., has created a Web-based platform to offer a range of data to physicians and patients.

The New York-based vendor's CareEngine decision support system previously used data from claims submitted to health plans, laboratories, pharmaceutical benefit management firms, and personal health records from ActiveHealth to identify gaps in care and patients appropriate for disease management programs.

Now, in partnership with Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp., ActiveHealth has built the Collaborative Care Solution around CareEngine to also pull data from electronic health records systems, as well as pathology and radiology systems, and to make information accessible via the Web. The new platform will offer a more robust data set to analyze and enable clinicians and patients to look at, says Greg Steinberg, M.D., CEO at Active Health.

A "care team application" that supports single-sign-on technology sits on a physician or hospital EHR and enables clinicians to look at "care considerations" that the CareEngine decision support system generates on a group of patients, such as diabetics, Steinberg explains.

Care considerations are one- or two-sentence representations of discrepancies between the care a patient is receiving and should be receiving. Physicians also have new access to patient panel data that can show the clinical risk profile of a physician's patients with specific medical conditions, and related workflow tools to assist in planning and implementing interventional treatment. "These are evidence-based, actionable pieces of information," Steinberg says.

Physicians also will have access to problem lists and the ability to benchmark their performance. For patients with ActiveHealth PHRs, the role-based Collaborative Care Solution functions as an enhanced PHR so they can see their care considerations and additional information in layman's terms.

In addition to disease management personnel, case and utilization management professionals also would have access to the enhanced data. Steinberg acknowledges that many physicians do not like dealing with case managers, but says that's a result of the clinical disconnect between the data a physician sees and the data that a case manager sees. The new system will remove the data discrepancies, he says. "It will remove some of the barriers that come from not having near real-time data and access to the same datasets. It will speed up and demystify the process, and reduce frustration."

The 700-physician Sharp Community Medical Group in San Diego is the first client of the Collaborative Care Solution service. It is going live now and expects to be fully operational by the end of the third quarter, Steinberg says. More information is available at activehealth.net and ibm.com.

--Joseph Goedert