Cerner Integrates 3M Grouping Methodology For Population Health Management

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

3M Health Information Systems’ Patient-centric software will be leveraged in Cerner’s HealtheIntent.

As pressure to adopt population health management strategies and programs intensifies, technology has enabled new initiatives to improve care coordination. Now, 3M Health Information Systems announced it is integrating its patient-focused Episodes Software with Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management platform.

One reason for the new emphasis on population health management is the desire to reduce costs to improve outcomes and boost healthcare efficiency, as Health IT Outcomes reported.

While the traditional approach to healthcare focused on services related to a single disease or event rather than the patient as a whole, HealtheIntent will now be able to take a patient-centric approach to healthcare by allowing providers to see all of an individual’s documented conditions rather than focusing on a single disease. As a result, providers can better define episodes of care while analyzing costs and anticipated resource use.

“An episode-based payment system that is designed around the patient is the next logical step in the evolution of health care 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.”

3M’s Patient-focused Episodes Software defines more than 500 episodes of care, from inpatient to outpatient and acute to chronic. It considers patients with complex health histories and comes up with risk-adjusted episodes that might benefit from analytics, officials said.