HIMSS14: Four Ways to Fail at Population Management

There are four main areas that health systems fall short in in improving population management, according to Harry Greenspun, M.D., during a Twitter event at HIMSS14 in Orlando.


There are four main areas that health systems fall short in in improving population management, according to Harry Greenspun, M.D., during a Twitter event at HIMSS14 in Orlando.

Greenspun, a senior adviser at Deloitte and an anesthesiologist, said at a ‘TweetUp’ sponsored by Siemens Corp. that health systems are not very good at sharing information and all parties involved have to share to get population management to work.
 
MIning  that vein, he added health systems aren't very good at coordinating care, either. “The handoffs don’t go very well, and you need to do a lot to make that happen.”
 
Health systems also fail at engaging customers/patients, who often don’t follow the instructions given to them once they leave the system. “[We’ve] done a terrible job in health care of changing people’s behavior and aligning incentives to make that happen,” he said, nothing that other industries and fields have better strategies to get people to do things that they don’t want to do.
 
Finally, health care has not done analytics in way that that lets “us know what is going on. How do we connect all this information together and make something meaningful out of it?”