The health IT vendor also has its sights set on precision medicine.
At HIMSS17 next week, Orion Health will debut updates to its Amadeus platform, which the company describes as a tool for acquiring, measuring, analyzing and presenting actionable clinical and claims data, as well as non-traditional data. The platform is designed to support population health management and alternative payment models, the company said.
“One of our major product lines is our Amadeus platform for population health management, but it has evolved into a platform for precision health,” said Suzanne Cogan, vice president at Orion Health, who explained precision health is Orion’s preferred term for precision medicine. “We’ve brought together some existing technologies and enabled them further with the ability to ingest new data, including genomics and social determinants. So healthcare organizations in later stages of development can apply some machine learning to their data to gain further insights.”
HealthInfoNet, a statewide health information exchange in Maine, has been a client of Orion Health for 10 years and is doing just that.
“They have come a long way and have a good critical mass of data and are applying machine learning to come up with precise health plans for individual patients,” Cogan explained.
Cogan said that the next logical step after population health management is precision medicine, and that’s where health IT needs to be.
“We’re still getting into the world of population health management in the U.S., trying to figure it out and understand which patients to focus on,” she said. “But you can look one step beyond that and once you figure that out and stratify your population, it is not going to be enough to put everyone in the same pathway for their health. It has come to light in cancer care, for example, that genetics and socioeconomic circumstances play a critical role. So to truly improve the health of a population, you have to look at it one individual at a time and look at how to improve the health of that individual.”
As a result, health IT professionals today have to keep their eyes on technologies that do a lot of work, Cogan added.
“Everyone has a great-sounding solution for something, but healthcare organizations are really complex and the market and reimbursement paradigms are evolving quite significantly,” she said. “So as IT executives are looking at all the really cool technologies to solve specific problems, they must think broadly: What is going to help the organization not just now but into the future for many problems? IT executives need to get technologies that serve multiple purposes and not just one particular use-case.”
HIMSS17 runs from Feb. 19-23, 2017 at the Orange County Convention Center.
This article originally appeared at the HealthcareITNews website.
