Innovation to Manage Specialty Populations

There is a lot of innovation in the US healthcare industry concerning ways to manage the care for specialty populations, but there still needs to be a way to regulate these innovative models. Matt Salo pointed out that for so long the financial incentives have not been there to get people healthy and keep them there, and meanwhile only a small part of the population accounts for half of the total costs.

“That’s the Holy Grail,” Salo said. “If we can figure out how to improve the care and bring the cost down for that group, then we’ll have figured all this out.”

Unfortunately, with all the emerging models out there, data is not being shared across boundaries and entities are caring for part of a person instead of the whole person, said Margaret E. O’Kane.

“I think the challenge is catching up with [current innovation], assessing it in a hard-nosed way, and really being able to make comparisons,” O’Kane said. “Part of the problem with a proliferation of innovation is that everybody’s doing something different and they’re all measuring it in a different way.”