RMS Healthcare has been promoting development of the primary care patient centered medical home (PCMH) and clinical integration of healthcare for the past several years. Healthcare delivery is currently undergoing significant transformation in hopes of improving quality and efficiency. Several activities are underway to help practices optimize healthcare through efficient operations. All indications are practices will continue to take the initiative in re-tooling their practice operations.

Here are some key excerpts of trends (according to a recent article written by Mr. Steve Schelhammer, CEO for Phytel, a data and technology corporation providing tools to physicians to  assist with patient population management):

• More and more providers will focus on the PCMH, which can produce short-term financial and clinical benefits while paving the way for the formation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).

• As structured electronic data becomes the norm, many more providers will be able to tap clinical databases for real-time identification of care gaps, automated outreach to patients who need preventive and chronic care, care coordination, predictive modeling and risk stratification of the population.

• Efforts to promote patients’ engagement in their own care will benefit from the accelerating use of automation technology to replace outmoded, inefficient manual processes. In addition to automated patient outreach methods, online educational tools and health-risk assessments will become commonplace.

• Finally, care management will benefit from the new automation approaches. Healthcare systems are placing care  coordinators within physician practices, and those professionals are beginning to leverage digitized health data to help them manage patient populations.

If you are interested in talking about how RMS Healthcare can help you organization or practice, contact our Transformation Services Manager, Susan Maxsween at SusanM@RMSresults.com or by calling (315) 635-9802.  For more healthcare articles on the RMS Bunker Blog, click on the healthcare category selection on the right toolbar.