At Rowan School of Osteopathic Medicine, we are offering this learning opportunity to our advanced students and I am one of the faculty members that volunteered to participate as an advisor. This meant that I identified an appropriate patient(s) for the students to work with, facilitated their first meeting, provided ongoing coordination including a home visit and follow up with them. We are now preparing for termination. This has been a very rewarding experience for me and yesterday I learned that we were more successful then some of the other teams from the area. Some of the schools involved were Jefferson, Geisinger, University of Penn, and John Hopkins.
I am recognizing that I want to be a life long learner. Although I am closing in on retiring ( 4 more years) I want to stay involved with healthcare education somehow. There were so many other educational programs advertised around the building that I was thinking of "crashing"some of them. I could become that old lady, sitting up front, in a corner, listening to lectures at a medical school. I love researching and learning medical developments. It was so refreshing to see that they are no longer training providers to only see disease but to see the whole person.
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Have you heard of ‘hot spotting’? It’s a really promising strategy that can help people with the most complex healthcare needs get the help they need, while dramatically lowering healthcare costs.
Developed organically out of Camden, NJ — one of the nation’s poorest cities — by physician Jeremy Brenner, hot spotting uses data to identify small groups of people who account for the most healthcare dollars.
Brenner and his team used hospital data to map ‘hot spots’ of healthcare high-utilizers. He found, for example, that one patient went to the hospital 113 times in a single year, and residents in just two Camden apartment buildings represented some of the city’s highest utilizers, accounting for $30 million in medical spending. Hotspotting
Hotspotting uses data to discover the outliers, understand the problem, dedicate resources, and design effective interventions. It is a movement for a new system of multi-disciplinary, coordinated care that treats the whole patient and attends to the non-medical needs that affect health: housing, mental health, substance abuse, emotional support.
Hotspotting uses data to discover the outliers, understand the problem, dedicate resources, and design effective interventions. It is a movement for a new system of multi-disciplinary, coordinated care that treats the whole patient and attends to the non-medical needs that affect health: housing, mental health, substance abuse, emotional support.
Dr. Jeffrey Brenner is a local physician who some believe might have the model to solve one of America’s most intractable problems: lowering the cost of health care. While analyzing medical billing data in Camden, N.J., he mapped out “hot spots” of the impoverished city’s high-cost patients. By targeting unique care — including home visits and social workers — at the city’s most costly patients, he developed a program that he argues has both lowered health care costs and provided better care in Camden. His organization, the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, and other similar models were the subject of a January 2011 feature in The New Yorker by journalist and physician Dr. Atul Gawande. Since then, Dr. Brenner’s medical strategy has garnered considerable attention — praised by some as a promising model worthy of more intense study and charged by others as a dangerous expansion of the health care system.But as Brenner tells FRONTLINE correspondent Gawande, “Better care for people is disruptive change.”
Healthcare hotspotting is the strategic use of data to reallocate resources to a small subset of high-needs, high-cost patients.
A small number of individuals drives much of the cost in the American health care system. The system is designed to work for the average patient, and like many large systems, it struggles to help extreme patients, or outliers – the small number of patients with complex, hard-to-manage needs and chronic conditions. These outliers are known as super-utilizers. Over time, their chronic conditions worsen, leading to ever more expensive, invasive and risky treatment. Super-utilizers are the patients our standard systems have failed.
