HIMSS Highlights Population Health Summit And The Tech That Surrounds It
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Population health has the attention of your clients and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is responding. HIMSS is hosting its PopHealth Summit, along with the mHealth Summit and CyberSecurity Summit, to make up the HIMSS Connected Health Conference.
- When: November 8 to 11, 2015
- Where: Washington D.C.
- Venue: The Gaylord National Resort
- Registration: Register for any of the three summits here
In a presentation by HIMSS Clinical & Business Intelligence Committee’s Taskforce on population health, H. Stephen Lieber, CAE, HIMSS President/CEO stated, “We know that 20 percent of any population of patients accounts for 80 percent of the healthcare costs. With population health management, the two main goals are to improve the health status of high-risk patients, and prevent any migration of healthy individuals to the chronically ill segment. The Population Health Summit will address these challenges and other components of population health with information on how to use available data to improve care and manage costs, steps that can help reverse the trend and the population of those who are chronically ill.”
The summit will feature 12 sessions across 2.5 days and host speakers from community health centers and academic medical centers sharing their insight on improving patient care and controlling cost through population health management. If you are able to attend, make sure to visit the Population Health Pavilion on the exhibition floor that will feature demonstrations of different processes, tools, technology, and systems all designed to streamline patient care and better patient outcomes.
Supporting Technology
As population health becomes more ubiquitous, so will the tech needed to support it. Data lakes and Big Data analytics have growing importance in relation to population health — both technologies whose importance will grow as accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other connected care organizations evolve and are incentivized by government programs and market demands.
In an interview with Health IT Analytics, Parsa Mirhaji, MD, PhD, associate professor of systems and computational biology and the director of clinical research informatics at the Albert Einstein College Of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center-Institute for Clinical Translational Research comments on the benefits that data lakes have over standard relational databases:
“The problem with that [standard relational databases] is that you have to predict all future-use cases … And the costs of changing your mind or your requirements are huge. And that’s why you end up with these data silos. You end up with different architectures for different problems, because you have to box the problem before you begin ... You don’t have to predict the future. You can start from where you are, from exactly where you are, based on the kinds of needs that you have right now with the confidence that it will grow into the dimensions and directions as your organization wants to grow.”