Susan Dentzer, President and CEO, for the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation (NEHI) www.nehi.net moderated a panel discussion at the Annual Datapalooza Conference www.healthdatapalooza.org held April 27-28, 2017 in Washington D.C. presented by Academy Health www.academyhealth.org, HHS www.hhs.gov, plus other supporting organizations.
Dentzer and panelists discussed several different ideas and thoughts related to evolving care delivery ideas and strategies. For example, Josh Rosenthal, Co-Founder PhD and CSO, for RowdMap https://rowdmap.com works with health plans all over the country and explained what it means for the patient and the medical community to have low value healthcare.
He said, “If patients have low value healthcare this does not mean they are treated with better care. It has been proven if patients and plan members receive high value care, the result for the patient is lower costs, lower risk, and patients can actually end up with less intensive and invasive treatments that very often will produce better outcomes than low value care treatments.”
Sachin Jain MD, CEO CareMore www.caremore.com explained that his organization has been operating as a Medicare Advantage plan in Los Angeles since 1993. The company has built its business around identifying high risk patients and is able to provide coordinated care for many seniors and frail patients. Also, the plan also educates patients on how to achieve better health, providers senior focused gyms, and transports patients to appointments to medical appointments.
Jaewon Ryu, MD, JD, EVP and CMO for Geisinger Health System https://www.geisinger.org discussed how Geisinger, an integrated health system, serving a stable population with twelve hospitals in the area, is able to meld rich genomic information into their patients’ clinical data.
He described how Geisinger’s “MyCode Community Health Initiative”, a precision-medicine project includes a system-wide biobank designed to store blood and other samples for research use by Geisinger and collaborators.
The MyCode initiative analyzes the DNA of patient-participants who sign up. So far, nearly 150,000 patient participants have signed up. The goal is to do research and apply that research to a patient’s personal care to find ways to diagnose medical conditions even before symptoms appear. Also, it is possible for physicians’ link with genetic counselors to discuss conditions and how patients should be treated if their situation warrants aggressive treatment.