The 2015 Becker’s Annual Meeting brought together leaders from healthcare systems across the country from May 7th – 9th in Chicago to engage in dialogue about the most pressing issues for today’s hospitals and healthcare organizations.  For the first time ever, Trexin was among the industry experts chosen to share its insights on healthcare analytics at the Annual Meeting, which was attended by more than 1,300 hospital and health system executives.

Trexin Analytics Expert, Isaac Cheifetz offered his insights at a panel session entitled “Redefining the C-Suite: The Changing Role of Analytics in Healthcare Leadership” to a packed room on day-two of the gathering.  Isaac and two other analytics experts delivered sound recommendations on how to develop successful analytics programs that are aligned with business needs, and fielded questions on topics ranging from how to ensure projects are staffed for success to what executives are expecting from the investment of analytics resources.

Our Healthcare Provider Lead, Jeffrey Hill, PhD, and Healthcare Policy and Compliance Lead, Laura Zaremba, also represented Trexin at the meeting, engaging in discussions with hospital and healthcare system leaders on how the transition to value-based care is impacting their organizations, their challenges and aspirations for data and analytics, and how they are addressing population health management.

The Trexin team attended dynamic presentations from integrated delivery system executives on their ambitious population health management and accountable care initiatives, and gained valuable insight into their current challenges.  The team also came away with an in-depth understanding of ongoing needs for data integration, analytics, and change management across hospitals and healthcare systems.

Several key insights emerged from these formal presentations and informal conversations:

• Executives in the hospital industry are keenly aware of payers’ expectations for phasing out fee-for-service in favor of value-based care and are heavily engaged in their organizations’ efforts to make that transition
• Healthcare system leaders are trying to rapidly broaden their organizations’ focus and mission from medical care to wellness
• As more care is moving into the ambulatory setting, hospitals are seeking to redefine the role of the hospital.  Hospitals are expanding into the ambulatory space
• Multi-state healthcare systems are continuing to grow in size and scope, expanding into technology ventures, wholly-owned health insurance plans and creating new capital funding structures within their enterprises
• Hospitals are partnering (with other hospitals) in an effort to share costs in moving to Population Health and to accelerate their transition to Value-Based Care
• Even healthcare organizations with successful and advanced accountable care initiatives continue to have challenges determining the total cost of care for their patients, population health status and care coordination gaps
• In this new era of Value-Based-Care, hospitals have moved from being a revenue center to a cost center.  Population Health is still a foreign concept for many traditional hospital executives
• Having made substantial investment in electronic health records systems, small- to medium-sized hospitals in particular are planning to heavily leverage those systems and their vendors for care coordination, analytics and population health management
• Health system leaders accept that the volume and complexity of change in the industry will continue at current levels or even accelerate, but they are very carefully evaluating how quickly to make long-term changes to their technology, infrastructure and human resources
• Hospitals see care coordination, clinical integration, and new models of care as the biggest issues over the next 3 years

Although there was near-unanimous consensus among participants that the healthcare delivery system was well past the point of no return on the road to accountable, value-based care, there was no clear consensus that overall spending on healthcare would actually be reduced in the future or where the ultimate sources of cost-savings would be.  The level of focus and energy around these issues, however, indicate that health system transformation in the United States is gaining velocity.