Population health- Is a tag, buzz and mega word in today's healthcare field, it best describes where we are and where we want to go, for healthcare today and tomorrow. It will require that we bring together the elements which have been absent for many years, comprehensive care management. 

Today we have what I call “segmental healthcare”, meeting the healthcare needs for the moment, healthcare for the immediate concern i.e. captured on a visit to your physician or an urgent care center, ED or Hospital, it is always viewed as what is happening today, what brings you here today. A brief medical history is taken as required

Absent of a 360 degree view and complete medical history from across the continuum of an individuals in one system which is a challenge with the time and demand for the physician’s time and the lack of having medical history across that individual’s medical history. This would include medications which contribute to a large number of medical incidents because of contraindications between certain drugs which is also a major cause of hospitalization and deaths. It would also exclude the ability to see previous visits to urgent or emergency room visits as well as hospitalizations. Once again medicine of the moment is what is being practice because of the lack of the aggregation of data across the continuum of care, it is most certainly not the medicine of the future that we need. It has been proven (look into this so we can quote data) not looking at the total picture leads to misdiagnosed episodes and over or under medication because of the lack of historical health information available. There has been a push to conglomerate the medical historical information across the continuum of care with the creation of Meaningful Use (MU). The problem is that though we are moving in that direction the vendors of Electronic medical health records (EHR's & EMR's) and similarly those in the space of Practice Management (PA) or Population health are reluctant to have other vendors access their code. It is the fear of healthcare professionals to share their data with others that slows this down. It has been proven that to collect data across the continuum of care and have it available when making medical decisions for a patient presents itself for care will provides better results, better outcomes, less hospitalizations and save money. The only entity that could aggregate medical diagnosis (ICD-10/ SnoMed), claims data from adjudicated claims (CPT-Codes), patient satisfaction results from CG & H- CAHPS, other Quality and outcomes from PQRS and now MACRA for Best Practice decisions is the Government. We will talk more about some of the nuances in my next blogs. 

By Mario Espino