By Tom Sullivan
CHICAGO — Hospitals and health systems need to equip doctors with advanced technologies that make them more effective caregivers for population health management programs to gain widespread purchase.
“The technology aspect of population health is confusing,” Shelley Price, director of Payer and Life Sciences at HIMSS, said today at the HIMSS Pop Health Forum 2016.
IT must be able to support care teams with analytics, care coordination and patient engagement tools, just as a start, according to Adrian Zai, MD, clinical director of Population Informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital Partners Healthcare.
Rishi Sikka, MD, senior vice president of transformation at Advocate Health Care added telehealth tools and smartphone apps to that list.
“All of those have to be fully integrated,” Zai said. “You have to have all these systems working together.”