Phytel's new Atmosphere platform integrates care management with patient engagement for a new approach to population health
DALLAS – The numbers are sobering. In the U.S., 10 percent of patients account for 70 percent of healthcare expenditures. Half of Americans are projected to be obese in 2030. One-third could have diabetes by 2050.
Seeking to address the growing crisis in population health, Phytel, which specializes in patient outreach, has launched a new Web-based, software-as-a-service tool that provides a holistic view of patient populations as it automates education, reminders and digital health coaching. The Atmosphere platform helps care managers to better manage quality and proactively engage patients in their health.
"We've automated the process of identifying patients in need of care, and then automated the steps needed to reengage the patient," says Phytel CEO Steve Schelhammer. "We're helping to reconnect them to the healthcare system. When that happens, a lot of other good things happen as well."
"Everybody is starting to wake up to the fact that they really need to find ways to engage the provider in population health management," says Schelhammer. Atmosphere offers a way to do that, making use of the "enormous data assets that we've accumulated, as well as our relationships with thousands and thousands of providers."
It offers a way to extend the reach of the physician "beyond the walls of the practice, by leveraging digital health coaching, multimodal communications to patients and their families," he says, and offering information to docs and care teams at the point of care and prompting them with reliable, actionable information to ensure proper follow-on treatment was delivered.
Russell Olsen, Phytel's VP of product management, bills Atmosphere as "the first SaaS platform to combine both the visualization of population health, from a dashboarding perspective, along with a powerful communication engine."
The technology offers providers a comprehensive way to track key metrics at one or more locations, or over an entire entity. They can also view health metrics over a customizable and stratifiable population view that can be "as narrow or broad as you'd like."
Say diabetes numbers for a given population subset are less than ideal. Atmosphere "let's you start asking the questions," says Olsen. "Is this a process failure? Is it a data problem? What's going on here and how do we correct it?"
From there, "we can begin to look at how we approach a population of diabetic patients," he says, "stratify them by blood sugar and cholesterol, get this natural grouping of high-risk patients" and "use care-management process to engage them specifically" via "automated campaigns about diet and exercise or diabetes education."
That sort of automation is a boon, says Olsen. The alternative is providers spending "thousands of hours trying to research, mine the data, pull reports together and try to communicate with all these patients individually."
As more providers embrace the concepts of the patient-centered medical home, as other organizations move toward becoming ACOs, as quality improvement programs proliferate and payment structures align accordingly, Schelhammer sees Atmosphere as a "provocative" technology that ensures the right care is given to the right people at the right time. Early users of the technology seem to agree.
"We went back to Phytel and said, 'You have all our data, we'd like to do more with it,'" says Ashok Rai, MD, president and CEO of Prevea Health, a multi-specialty clinic in Green Bay, Wis. that was one of Atmosphere's pilot sites. So far, the results have been promising.
Mining that information lode has led to "better real-time data, specifically in primary care settings" and "the ability to organize and approach it in a much more proactive manner, rather than reactive," he says. "We see this as a true component to a value equation," he adds, noting the potential for "a sustainable difference" in care quality and cost.
To truly effect a change in population health, "it takes a redesign of our own processes and how we approach healthcare," says Rai. "As we do that, the tools we use need to be redesigned with us. Typical EMR products are all transactional based – they're only about the patient that's in front of you. Not a single EMR product out there was really designed about a population." With Atmosphere, he says, Phytel has helped harness "actionable" data that can help make a difference on a larger scale.
The tool's ability to drill into practice management software and identify patients who need to come in based on the lack of information on their record has "been wonderful," echoes Mary Stull, RN, vice president and COO of Elmhurst, Ill.-based Elmhurst Clinic, a Phytel partner for many years. "We've had thousands of appointments over the last four years coming from that. That's thousands of patients coming in for chronic disease care or preventative care that probably would not have come in."
That's good news for population health. And, not incidentally, "that's generated revenue for us – which is an aside to this conversation, but it's important to have that component."
Atmosphere helps address a number of aspects of care "that really need to be stitched together," says Donald R. Lurye, MD, Elmhurst's CEO. "What health risks exist? How do you assess them? How do you transmit that information to the care team? How can they deal with it once the patient presents? How do you support patient self-management? How do you make sure hand-offs and transitions are handled as smoothly as possible?
"We think of ourselves as healers, but on one level we're in the information business," Lurye adds. "Care has gotten very complex, and there's a lot of information that needs to be organized and considered. I think that's what the Atmosphere suite of products is driving towards."
