Preferences
Related Series
Related Segments
Population Health Data Acquisition & Analysis 2020
Turning Data into Actionable Insights
Hoping to consolidate population health management (PHM) solutions, healthcare organizations today are seeking out technology that addresses a wide variety of their PHM needs. Most of the core functionality that organizations are looking for centers around data acquisition and data analysis. This report offers a focused look at the first two pillars of PHM—data acquisition and data analysis—to uncover which solutions do best at compiling accurate, timely data and turning it into actionable insights. This report also includes an overall update on vendor performance in all PHM areas.
Pillars of Population Health Management Technology
For more information about KLAS' population health management pillars, see our previous research on this topic. For information specific to the care management pillar, please see KLAS’ 2019 care management report.
The following pages explore vendor performance in the areas of data acquisition and analysis. Not all vendors measured in this report deploy deep functionality for both. Focused primarily on clinical data, Enli isn’t heavily used for data curation or normalization; thus, they are not included in the data acquisition section. Allscripts is excluded from the data analysis section as most customers interviewed for this research do not leverage Allscripts’ analytics functionality.
DATA ACQUISITION
The end result of successful data acquisition is a view of patient data that is accurate, timely, and complete. This happens when (1) data is aggregated from multiple sources, resulting in a more complete picture; (2) data is well curated, ensuring high accuracy; and (3) an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) is provided, ensuring data is associated back to the correct patient.
Innovaccer Earns Physician Trust Via Strong Data Mapping
Innovaccer and Azara Healthcare (who primarily helps FQHCs manage clinical data and has limited feedback) are both noted for implementations that emphasize data accuracy and strong interfaces. These vendors help customers establish data mapping processes for acquiring, cleaning, and normalizing the data that is relevant to them, resulting in users having complete, timely data that guides decision-making. Innovaccer customers also highlight strong partnership, saying the vendor helps them interface with community partners to provide clinicians with data they are confident to act on. Azara customers point to deep partnering during interface creation as well as during ongoing optimization efforts. With customers focused mostly on quality reporting of clinical data only, SPH Analytics does well with timeliness. Some customers worry about accuracy when claims data is involved. Epic and Allscripts customers report concerns about data accuracy—Epic customers would like better merging of claims and clinical data; Allscripts customers would like a less manual curation process.
DATA ANALYSIS
In population health management, the goal of data analysis is to turn data into actionable insights easily accessed within end users’ workflows. This is most likely when vendors provide guidance and help customers customize the data presentation to meet organization- and user-specific needs. In addition to guidance, other key performance indicators for data analysis include reporting and dashboards, prioritized worklists, and risk scoring.
Reporting & Dashboards: Flexible, Easy-to-Use Dashboards from Azara Healthcare, SPH Analytics Deliver the Right Data at the Right Time
Azara Healthcare and SPH Analytics—followed by Arcadia.io, Enli, and Innovaccer—are most often noted for providing easy-to-use dashboards customized to end users’ specific workflows. This puts the right data into users’ hands at the right time, enabling them to act on the insights provided, whether at the point of care or within an administrative workflow. Because of the customizability, customers feel these solutions meet all or a large majority of their reporting and dashboard needs. While other solutions may be able to provide many of the same insights, accessing these insights requires a sometimes prohibitive amount of manual effort.
Prioritized Worklists: Identifying Actionable Insights Requires Manual Effort for Customers of Lightbeam, NextGen, Optum
Lightbeam, NextGen Healthcare, and Optum customers say their end users have to spend too much time sifting through data in order to identify actionable insights. Lightbeam customers would appreciate customizable views for different types of end users. NextGen Healthcare customers would like improved integration to capture all pertinent data and improve clinician confidence in the data; some customers supplement their NextGen solution with systems from other vendors to make decisions about care gaps. Optum customers note having to do additional data mapping before end users trust the data enough to analyze it for their specific needs. Leaders in this area—including Azara Healthcare, HealthEC, and Innovaccer—spend time up front customizing dashboards to specific end users’ needs to help them prioritize their workflows.
Risk Scoring: Optum’s Broad Risk-Model Experience Drives Success with a Variety of VBR Arrangements
Optum’s strong understanding of different risk models and risk-stratification methods comes from their deep involvement in the payer space and enables them to provide insights for almost any type of VBR arrangement. Customers say Optum helps them assess risk and build patient registries that are closely aligned with their reimbursement models. Other vendors that do well in this space—Arcadia.io, Azara Healthcare, and HealthEC—are noted for their deep understanding of customers’ revenue models. These vendors have pushed to enhance their risk models as customers’ needs have evolved. A few customers of Health Catalyst, who once excelled in this area, report a lack of diversity in the risk models for which the vendor is able to provide insights. Having encountered hurdles in the aggregation of clinical and claims data, several NextGen Healthcare customers report delays in being able to do risk scoring.
OVERALL PHM PERFORMANCE
Key PHM Market Trends in 2020
The paragraphs below provide brief summaries of some of the most significant trends among population health management vendors in 2020.
- Innovaccer has maintained high customer satisfaction amidst rapid growth. Their product development makes them one of the few vendors to keep pace with customers’ varied integration and technology demands and leads to them being chosen in a high percentage of the purchase decisions in which they are considered.
- Cerner and Epic have continued to build out their PHM platforms. However, customers’ complex and varied data-acquisition and risk-based-contract needs can outpace current offerings, leading to lower clinician confidence.
- Allscripts’ CareInMotion platform is seeing high replacement. Organizations that continue with the product often report low adoption and isolated deployment.
- Both small and large organizations looking to consolidate more PHM workflows to a single platform report high interest in Arcadia.io and Lightbeam, and the vendors are more likely than competitors to be chosen in the purchase decisions in which they are considered.
- Optum’s new Optum Performance Analytics offering (replacing Optum One) has been met with high satisfaction among initial customers. They report improved ease of use and more comprehensive functionality.
About This Report
Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT products and services their organizations use. These interviews are conducted using a standard quantitative evaluation, and the scores and commentary collected are shared in reports like this one and online in real time so that other providers and IT professionals can benefit from their peers’ experiences. To enable readers to more quickly understand high-level differences in vendor performance and give better context as to how each product compares to other offerings in the market, KLAS has organized the questions from the standard evaluation into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.
To supplement the data gathered with this standard evaluation, KLAS also creates various supplemental evaluations that target a subset of KLAS’ overall sampling and delve deeper into the most pressing questions facing healthcare technology today.
The data in this report comes from both evaluation types and was collected over the last 12 months; the number of unique responding organizations for each is given in the following chart.
What Does “Limited Data” Mean?
Some products are used in only a small number of facilities, some vendors are resistant to providing client lists, and some respondents choose not to answer particular questions. Thus a vendor’s sample size may vary from question to question and may not reach KLAS’ required threshold of 15 unique respondents. When a vendor’s sample size for a particular question is less than 15, the score for that question is marked with an asterisk (*) or otherwise designated as “limited data.” If the sample size is less than 6, no score is shown. Note that when a vendor has a low number of reporting sites, the possibility exists for KLAS scores to change significantly as new surveys are collected.
Overall scores are measured on a 100-point scale and represent the weighted average of several yes/no questions as well as other questions scored on a 9-point scale.
Writer
Elizabeth Pew
Designer
Jess Wallace-Simpson
Project Manager
Mary Brown
This material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2024 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.