Issue & Focus
- The California Healthcare Foundation is dedicated to the improvement of the lives of Californians managing chronic illnesses.
- There are many community stakeholders involved in supporting this goal; their work could be improved by making connections to each other that are meaningful for patients.
- This is part of a broader strategic plan to support the objective of involving patients and families in all aspects of their care. This is the identified gap to be closed through this work.
- California Healthcare Foundation is seen as catalyst and partner for patient engagement in California. It’s scope is 36,000,000 Californians
Current Condition
- All chronic conditions can benefit from better patient engagement
- Hypertension is a good example of one – recently published studies demonstrate both the gap and the opportunity with non-office-based approaches
Problem Analysis
- Divided into three areas : Clinical Gap, Technology Gap, Partnership Gap, that California Healthcare Foundation can connect partners to assist with
- Clinical Gap: Patient role in recognizing blood pressure out of control; currently this rests with the physician, in an office-based setting
- Technological Gap: Chronic disease assessment is typically performed in the office or medical setting
- Partnership Gap: Stakeholders (patients, payers, providers, connectivity providers) are not connected to patients and one another at the same time
- The societal costs of inadequate management are spread diffusely; few organizations are able to to see the total harm from this perspective
Target Condition
This pilot seeks to create a functioning ecosystem that supports chronic disease management across the lifecycle, with the best candidate being hypertension
Action Plan
We began by interviewing example employers, health care providers, and technology providers to understand which approaches and components appeared most promising. At this time, it seems most reasonable to approach this first from the employer perspective.
Next step will be to convene a group of potential partners in July, 2008, at California Healthcare Foundation, to discuss how pieces would fit together.
A presentation would be made to the CHCF Board in the fall, with funding and activity to begin in 2009.
Cost / Cost-Benefit / Waste Recognition
There are recognized wastes, which include unnecessary visits for blood pressure monitoring, inadequate medication therapy, and inadequate use of the health system, for patients who have not been seen in the past 12 months.
There are costs including, technology costs (although the goal is not to build anything new), and realignment of incentives to support non-visit-based care.
Followup / Unresolved Issues
Points of concern and planned countermeasures
- What is the metric for patient access? (Pacific Business Group on Health is working on an employee engagement survey; metrics for patient access to their health data may need to be developed)
- How can this complement the launch of both a P4P measure for blood pressure management, and a HEDIS “Relative Resource Use for Uncomplicated Hypertension” measure for 2008?
- Data for presenteeism and productivity loss does not seem intuitive (I have reviewed this in depth and we can bring in clinical champions to verify)
- Partners and aligned interests (will do due diligence to support cooperative business models of partners)
- How to engage patients in things like biometric monitoring and blood pressure control (there is data supporting patient interest in this monitoring, but most importantly will go to the factory floor, and will bring an employee/patient advisor on to the team)
That’s the latest script that goes with the story, more or less. Comment away, and keep in mind that each comment will change the A3 a little every time.
