The latest rage - population health management

If all population health experts are correct, in the next few years Big Data will know more than you want it to know about your medical and insurance information, you will be risk-dissected, de-duplicated, magically attributed to the provider of your dreams, and in the end you will be healthier, and you’ll have no care gaps as defined by a bureaucracy that believes you need to fill those gaps.

Accountable doctors and their care teams will be miraculously transformed into highly efficient groups of preventative and chronic care task masters, CMS will somehow transform into a highly efficient MACRA and MIPS on-time payment showcase, and the insurance companies will be pleased with their margins on risk-adjusted, globally capitated, delegated risk contracts as a percentage of their fixed costs.

If you need a dictionary or maybe even a thesis to understand the words above, you are not alone. Even people in the emerging field of population health only understand a small percentage of what I just described. And, even with the new Trump administration promise to repeal and replace Obamacare the timeline for value-based reimbursement is a juggernaut that will continue to plow ahead.

So imagine you’re a healthcare or technology investor and somehow even with your years of healthcare knowledge and experience you are thrust into having to make a decision regarding investing large sums of cash into the population health/value-based sector. What should you be aware of and what are the key variables that you need to consider in the next three to five years?