A new population health management tool has been released by ODH and IBM Watson Health to help managed care groups. Healthcare DIVE brought this information to us in their article, “ODH, Watson Health add tool to growing digital behavioral health landscape.”
The platform is called Mentrics and it targets three areas — behavioral health population management, provider network performance and patient care coordination. Mentrics will work with the Watson Health Cloud to gather a patient’s health data from disparate sources and aggregate it into a platform to help coordinated care. Among the information captured will be physical and behavioral health services the individual has received, and prescription claims.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) tell us that treatment costs for people with mental health diagnoses are 75% higher than for patients with other medical conditions, and lack of care coordination often drives those costs higher.
This is another tool in the efforts to respond to mental health care challenges. Technology is finally getting to the point where the investment is paying off. The next few years should provide even more advancement in technology and benefit to the users.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
