Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Lauren Patrick, CEO of Healthmonix (Part 1)

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Fascinating view into quality monitoring in healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Healthmonix. 

Lauren Patrick: I’m the Founder and CEO of Healthmonix. I started the company in 2009. It’s been 11 years. We help care providers provide better evidence-based care and better outcomes for patients in the United States.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean?

Lauren Patrick: We know that the US is not one of the leading countries in the world in terms of quality of care. We have a lower patient outcome. We have higher patient mortality. Our population is just not as healthy as populations in other countries, and yet we spend so much money on healthcare.

We dig in and help understand where the issues are and change that. Sometimes that means educating healthcare professionals in terms of what the education-based practices are. Sometimes, it means changing workflows because healthcare providers just don’t have appropriate workflows. Sometimes it means listening to the patient better to make sure we’re giving the patient what they need in terms of appropriate treatment and outcome. 

Sometimes, it means actually spending less on patients. We’re overmedicating, overanalyzing, and over-diagnosing.

Sramana Mitra: Could you double-click down further into what you’re doing? Who is the customer? Is it the hospital system? Is it doctors’ offices? Whom are you selling to? How are you providing your intervention?

Lauren Patrick: We sell to different kinds of healthcare providers. We work with solo practitioners, all the way up to a health system. The driver for what we’re doing has been a program that Medicare put in place called MIPS. It’s an incentive program that incentivizes for quality metrics and the cost of taking care of patients. We help those providers analyze that data and do better.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some use cases where you have been able to create meaningful impact.

Lauren Patrick: We work at a couple of different levels. Let me start with an orthopedic practice that we were working with where they weren’t able to see all the various metrics in their EHR. While EHRs are great at transactions with patients, they don’t give you a full picture of your patient treatment.

We bring all of the data in for that orthopedic practice. We improve their performance on a lot of quality metrics by 60% to 100% through insights into the relevant measures. 

Sramana Mitra: Please be a lot more granular and more visceral.

Lauren Patrick: If an orthopedic practice is looking at the quality of their care, we try to do it without encumbering the providers anymore than they already are. We go into their EHR and we pull out all of the data for all of their patients.

We take that data and we compare it against valid quality metrics that have been developed by the powers that be in the US. We take that data from the EHR and we compare it to these quality metrics and give them back to the organization in the form of relevant insights.

To the providers, we say, “For your patients that have had hip surgery, how well are they able to live and perform after they had this surgery?” We provide that back to the providers in a quality metric dashboard so they can check their overall performance.

If they’re not doing well, they can drill-down, provider by provider and patient by patient, and see where they’re falling short. We can help them through their workflows. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Lauren Patrick, CEO of Healthmonix
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