The Voice of the Patient

I am a fan of Malcolm Gladwell, the writer who has made a career out of figuring out how things work.  With his book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference,” he explored the dynamics of social epidemics. More recently he wrote, “Outliers: The Story of Success,” which delved into the many variables involved in determining an individual’s success.

If you are at all interested in how new ideas are formed and how they evolve and develop into products that change the world, I urge you to check out his most recent article in the New Yorker, Creation Myth.

How does all of this apply to QualityMetric and patient-reported outcomes? Well, on one level, the conceptual model described by Mr. Gladwell has much in common with QualityMetric’s own story. But just as importantly, it shows how difficult it can be to bring a big idea like the computer mouse or laser printer to the general population. Now that both are in our homes and so much a part of our daily lives we can’t imagine how difficult it was for their creators to get them here.

I strongly believe that our health status surveys, offering the patient’s perspective on health outcomes, will someday reach the stature of the computer mouse. Something we all use every day. Something that makes our lives easier and we can’t conceive of living without.

Gus

Let me start by welcoming you to QualityMetric’s updated website. Our home page has received a much needed face-lift and most of the site’s content has been refreshed. These changes have two purposes: 1) make it easier for visitors to find what they want and 2) make the site more interactive.

We’ve added an at-a-glance site map at the bottom of the home page which neatly organizes all the content available on the website, making everything more easily accessible.

As for interactivity, welcome to our new blog, “Voice of the Patient,” which I will share with friends and colleagues: Mark Kosinski, MA and Martha Bayliss, MSc here at QualityMetric.

Martha, Mark and I will be commenting on the latest happenings in the world of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) and offering our views on the future of measurement in health care. Whether you agree or disagree, we invite you to comment. Keep up with the blog automatically by subscribing to our RSS Feed.

That’s not all. We have also included a new discussion group functionality. Here you will find the latest information and customer feedback on our most popular topics. Think of it as an interactive FAQ section.

As many of you know, QualityMetric was acquired by Ingenix in March of this year. Without fear of overstatement, I can say that this is the most important moment in our company’s history. The benefits in terms of new resources and opportunities for our customers and employees have been off the charts, but there is one area of collaboration and serendipity that really gets me excited.

It is well established in the scientific literature that PROs have a great deal to offer our ever changing and not yet perfect health care system. Examples of this can be easily found just by perusing our many case studies. But what’s the next generation in this emerging field? Integrating standardized, real-time patient-reported health status with claims data.

PRO data becomes infinitely more powerful when it is coupled with claims data, allowing a more complete picture of what’s going on within a population. When health status data can be matched to diagnosis, procedure codes, date of service etc. the meaningful outputs to plan executives and administrators becomes very valuable and unavailable anywhere else.

At the highest order, we can now correlate PRO results with claims, lab and pharmacy data – giving us the ability to have real-time, high-confidence predictive models. QualityMetric’s scientists have done this work at the research level for years. But bringing this theoretical work to the real world will give the health care system its first ever tool set for comparing outcomes and treatments across all conditions, populations and time points with unique standardized outputs for:

• Understanding SF™ Health Survey scales and scores in the context of the natural history of conditions
• Disease impact
• Medical expense prediction
• Likelihood of job loss
• Health transition probabilities

Further, this new index of correlations would allow large employers, payers, and governments to understand the health of members who are chronically ill but not seeking care. This would become:

• A real-time case finder for impacting members who are ill but not seeking care and who have limited claims data in the system
• A real-time, cost avoidance sentinel system for finding members who are experiencing deleterious health transitions but not seeking care and who are similarly invisible to traditional tool sets

The days of defining individual health as the presence or absence of administrative claims are behind us.

Standardized functional health status is bringing clinical trials efficacy measures beyond product approval and into patient management, safety monitoring, treatment decision making and consumer decision support.

Gus