Two major healthcare IT vendors, Cerner and 3M Information Systems, have announced a partnership in which 3M’s patient-focused episodes software will be integrated with Cerner’s population health management platform.
The idea, according to the companies’ officials, will be to enable providers to view the landscape of a patient’s documented conditions to help define an episode of care, while analyzing costs and expected resource use. They noted that the conventional approach to defining an episode is to focus on the services related to a single disease rather than the patient as a whole. However, Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health platform will be enhanced to take a patient-centric episode approach, by using a measure for payment and quality that represents the treatment a patient experienced across care settings, officials said.
In the announcement, 3M executives said that its patient-focused episodes software defines over 500 episodes of patient care spanning inpatient and outpatient encounters as well as chronic and acute diseases. It accounts for patients with multiple conditions and complex health histories, and produces clinically meaningful, risk-adjusted episodes for opportunity and intervention analysis. “An episode-based payment system that is designed around the patient is the next logical step in the evolution of healthcare payment systems,” said JaeLynn Williams, president, 3M Health Information Systems. “By creating a defined time period, individual clinicians work as a unified team toward a single, clearly stated goal—to carry each patient across the episode finish line as efficiently and excellently as possible.”
HealtheIntent’s enterprise data warehouse, HealtheEDW, will support bundled payments, compare provider costs and provide classification such as diagnosis-related group (DRGs). Providers will receive a more comprehensive view and information to support evaluating the effectiveness of care, predicting costs and refining patient treatment processes to improve outcomes, officials noted.
“Cerner continues to advance the industry with innovations in population health management. The 3M software further expands the breadth of our population health management offerings to give our clients solutions and content they can use to more effectively manage health and care as well as costs,” said Bharat Sutariya, M.D., vice president and CMO, population health, Cerner.
Both Cerner and 3M ranked in the top quartile of health IT revenue earners in this year’s Healthcare Informatics 100 list.
