NBJ: Solving Healthcare's "Overuse" Problem

Nashville Business Journal’s Eleanor Kennedy recently caught up with our CEO, Dan Hogan. Based on their conversation, she wrote the article below which discusses Medalogix’s next step into the third, and highest tier of analytics–prescriptive analytics.

WhenDan Hoganlaunched Medalogix, he was offering a tool that could help home health careproviders cope with the switch to payment based on outcomes in a market where it wasn’t yetclear what outcomes-based payment — that is, payment based on quality of care, rather thenumber of services provided — would look like.

In other words: He was a bit early.Eight years later, now that the Centers for Medicare and MedicaidServices have spelled out and heartily embraced that outcome-based system and Medalogix hasfound success, Hogan is eyeing the next frontier.

“We’ve been listening for the last eight years in the space of predictive analytics,” Hogan said, in which the company analyzes data to tell providers, among other things, which patients are most likely to need more care. That’s one step beyond descriptive analytics, the most basic level of analysis.

“We’re now moving into step three,” Hogan continued, “which is prescriptive.”

With the prescriptive tool the company is readying, Medalogix can recommend a care plan most likely to benefit certain patients. The decisions are still in the hands of the clinicians caring for those patients, Hogan said, but the company’s new tool will be able to lay out information that can help drive that decision-making.

Hogan is bullish on the potential benefit this technology holds for the industry as a whole — prescriptive tools can make a big dent in wasted spending in home health, he argues — as well as for the company. With the addition of this technology, Medalogix has another potential client pool in the care managers that work with payers to ensure patients receive the right care in the right setting, as well as, eventually, the payers themselves.

“The problem that we’re seeing analytically is that an enormous percentage of home health is probably overuse,” Hogan said. “That’s detrimental to all of us. … That really costs the system.”

Hogan said the company is working with a large home health company to roll out a beta version of the product early next year, and then hopes to have it officially on the broader market by August 2017.

“Right now this is the cutting edge of health care analytical technology,” Hogan said, “and we’re really proud to be a part of that.”

*Originally published in theNashville Business Journal.