Last year it became clear that the term ACO-enablement was going out of fad, and a new buzzword — population health management (PHM) — was surfacing. After interviews with several industry stakeholders, it soon became clear to us at Chilmark Research that there were high levels of interest in:

1. Just how new sources of clinical data (EHR, HIE, user-generated), were going to be ingested into analytics systems, and:
2. How providers were going to adopt analytics for PHM as they began to take on patient health risk in value-based reimbursement contracts.

As we continued interviewing vendors and talking to people in the field, our first Analytics research endeavor, Clinical Analytics for Population Health Management (CAPH) Market Trends Report, (expected publication: week of Aug 19th – stay tuned) began to take shape. As an analyst I was both excited to dive right in, and at the same time daunted by the level of technical, clinical, and business-model complexity that would be involved.

A large, thorny, elephant was in the room that no one seemed to want to talk about — were providers the right parties to take on patient health risk? Would they fail like payers before them? Regardless, providers were starting to march down the risk continuum, and I was going to follow them.

As we began talking to more vendors, it soon became clear that an incredible number of them were pivoting, purporting to serve the CAPH market. Some were positioning offerings along the ACO lines, others were talking about Big Data, and others preferred a Population Health Management marketing message. In the end we selected 14 vendors to profile across several different categories:

The process of interviewing these vendors and their end-users was initially tedious, as vendors often had radically different architectural approaches and stances on the market. A common language had not (and has not) developed for talking about CAPH, and I soon learned to speak claims-centric and clinical-centric dialects.

Over the coming month I will be writing a series of posts on some of the more interesting findings from the report. Please feel free to leave comments below or get in touch with me directly if you are interested in clinical analytics/population health management — I will enjoy any and all feedback and as I continue to follow the CAPH space closely over the coming year.