Disease Management Application

Salem Health Solutions (SHS) is a for-profit health information provider based in Winston-Salem, NC, serving employers, payors, health care systems and research entities.  Its services include data warehousing, data analysis and consulting.  Through a partnership with MEDai, SHS also provides clinical decision support and high-risk predictor modeling. 

Challenge

SHS recently assisted one of their clients with data collection and reporting related to their Disease Management programs.  The client required a system that would enable identification, stratification and management of members with various diseases, as well as standardized reporting and outcomes measurements.   While SHS had the ability to identify the problem and design a 'conceptual' solution, it needed additional resources to implement the idea.  In addition, SHS also required a six-week turnaround time. Stratapult was the only vendor SHS contacted who could complete the project in the time frame required.

Solution

Working closely with SHS, Stratapult conceived the technical design, programmed the application, made revisions based on SHS' testing and feedback, and deployed the application. 

Stratapult and SHS developed a browser-based application that provided the following capabilities through a secure environment:

• Automated identification and stratification of members with the managed diseases through Surveys and Claims.  Nurses can manually enter any newly identified members that are referred via case management, physicians or other sources.
• Automated maintenance of member information, including members who have disenrolled from the health plan, updating demographic, provider and employer information, updating tables to include newly identified members, routinely reassessing stratification of previously identified members, updating various fields based on returned surveys, etc. 
• Login screen that validates whether the user has provided appropriate credentials to access the application. 
• Administrative capabilities that allow users with administrative rights to add, edit and delete users, as well as reset passwords. 
• Various drill-down capabilities that allow the user to select a subset of the total population or search for an individual member.
• Display of demographic, provider and employer information, which is automatically populated and updated based on daily feeds from the client.
• Ability to record and edit member-specific and disease-specific information.  All edits are retained, and the user can view a history of all previous information, including who made the edits and when they were made. 
• Ability to review the results of all returned (scanned) surveys and to enter telephonic assessment data. 
• Ability to view the most recent six months of claims data in descending chronological order.
• A contact management system that allows the Disease Managers to record general comments and contacts for specific patients.
• Ability to view numerous real-time reports that provide overall statistics about the Disease Management programs and information helpful to the day-to-day management of the populations.

Impact

The primary benefit of the application is its ability to perform algorithmic identification and stratification of patients based on health risk status.  This enables the Disease Managers to intervene before patients become high risk. Standardized reporting across all programs allows for the evaluation of the effectiveness of the programs.

The application and underlying database provide a secure environment to store identified member information and track the history of disease management interventions for those members.  Creation of standard table structures and a user-friendly interface allow the Disease Managers to efficiently and effectively administer the Disease Management programs and assist them in their day-to-day activities, while ensuring data integrity, consistency and accuracy. 

The application was very well received and is being used to support the day-to-day operations of the customer's eight-member Disease Management department. 

"Stratapult's experienced technical resources allowed us to strategically design an application that provides value to our customers," said Lisa Kabasakalian, Director of SHS. "Stratapult completed the project on budget and, more importantly, met our extremely aggressive timeline. Furthermore, the staff was committed and focused on completing the project within the guidelines I provided, while seeking my input and incorporating it as the project progressed.  It was definitely a team effort.  And the result is a product that gives us the ability to capture and report on important information and has therefore improved our satisfaction rating with our customer."