ActiveHealth, Author at ActiveHealth Management

I began my love affair with data and computers in college in the mid-1970s, programming on an IBM mainframe with punch cards. From my residency through my time as Chief Medical Officer of a hospital, I stayed involved with innovation in the realm of data and information technology.

Eventually, I decided to dive completely into the world of health care data analytics. Nothing makes me happier at work than to be knee deep (or deeper) in data. Whether it’s assessing quality, answering a question or solving a problem toward improving population health. That’s really the heart of my work now – proving to clients that we’re improving the health of their population.

What is health?

Describing health to our clients isn’t easy. We have terabytes of data about our members. We can tell them about the prevalence of chronic conditions. We can point out lifestyle and biometric risks. We can describe clinical outcomes. We can identify gaps in care. We can literally show tables and tables of data. At the end, they have trouble putting it together and still don’t really understand what all of that means for the overall health of their population. We needed some sort of metric that could simplify, aggregate and describe health.

The Spectrum of Health

The Spectrum of Health was our first attempt. It looked at episodes of care and put members in one of 6 categories:

Healthy
Healthy with risk
Minor chronic conditions
Major chronic conditions
Complex chronic conditions
Catastrophic – high-cost claimants

We described the health of the population by how members fit in those categories. Notice that by and large, we were looking only at physical health. And we viewed wellness in terms of lifestyle risks and other health issues that can be risk factors of chronic conditions, like cholesterol, smoking and stress.

The shortfall of the spectrum was that it’s not an outcomes measure. People thought we were going to shift their population from less healthy categories to more healthy categories. Not true. Think about a person with kidney disease. We can help them manage it, but we’re not going to cure it and move them out of the major chronic category. So, while the spectrum gave us a picture of health, it wasn’t the metric we were looking for.

Multi-dimensional health

Now, the hot topic in our industry is well-being. The concept of well-being says that it’s not enough to be just physically healthy. There are other factors – emotional health, social connectedness, financial security and so forth. But even just within the category of physical health, we can still look at it in terms of a multi-dimensional perspective.

This thinking led us to develop the Active Health Index. It’s a much more sophisticated tool than the Spectrum of Health and considers ten dimensions of health – six of which are impactable. The Active Health Index addresses three fundamental questions of interest to our clients.

What is the health of my population?
What are the opportunities to improve their health?
How much did health improve between two points in time?

So, not only does it measure health, but it’s an outcomes tool as well. We can measure the changes we are making in the impactable dimensions over time. We’re excited about it, and so are our clients.

Check yes or no

Our patented CareEngine® technology is the foundation of the Active Health Index. It ingests a massive amount of information about our members and creates an enormous, longitudinal database.

All of this data passes through thousands of clinical rules. We distill it into markers. Markers are basically a yes/no about things related to a member. Are you a smoker – yes or no? Do you have diabetes – yes or no?

We took all of these markers and looked at the most logical way to organize them. What we saw was that they seemed to fit naturally into ten dimensions. There are four non-impactable dimensions – things we can’t change but that do impact your overall health, like your age. The other six dimensions are impactable. They’re things like medication adherence and lifestyle and biometric risks, even the member’s self-perception of health.

At ActiveHealth, we believe in a personalized approach to population health. We know that members with diabetes don’t all need exactly the same support. The Active Health Index helps identify areas for improvement that are specific to each person. This data threads through every interaction the member has with us. It prioritizes what appears to the member in our digital experience. And it’s part of the individual care plans that our coaches and clinicians develop for our members.

As members act on their opportunities for improvement, we can see it. We can measure the change over time, and we can report on it at a population level to our clients. It gives them a simple, aggregated picture of the health of their employees. From there, they can create the population health solution that will have the most impact on the health and well-being of their employees.

If the key to successful population health management is what you know and how you use it, the Active Health Index can be the foundation of both.

Dr Lia Rodriguez

By the age of 8, I knew in my heart I wanted to be a doctor – a pediatrician, to be exact. As I achieved this goal and began my practice, it was rewarding to help my young patients live their healthiest lives. I checked their growth and vaccinated them during checkups, treated ear infections and prescribed treatments for asthma attacks. As much impact as I could have on their individual needs, I realized that the people with the greatest impact on their health were their caregivers. They had the best chance to shape the development of healthy habits that last a lifetime.

Children are guided by a wide variety of stakeholders in their community ecosystem. They take their cues from the adults in the expanding world around them – initially from their parents and family members, then from teachers and coaches. As they grow older, they look up to athletes, celebrities and, in the age of social media, influencers. They model their choices, what’s fashionable, what to eat and how to act. I came to realize I could have a much greater impact on the well-being of children if I affected the lives of the adults supporting them as well. This realization lured me away from the exam room. I made it my career goal to improve the lives of people at scale thus having the greatest impact on children – the adults of tomorrow – and perpetuating a chain of healthy people.

Joining ActiveHealth as the Chief Medical Officer felt like a natural next step on my path toward this goal. Our members often talk about the ripple effect of our work together. As one member put it, “I never realized how unhealthfully I and my family were eating. They have followed my lead with eating healthier, making healthier choices and being more physically active.” This is the beginning of the creation of a new legacy of healthy choices for this family. It’s the start of generational health. This is exactly what we’re trying to accomplish – better health for the people who engage with us and for all the people they care about.

Health care has traditionally focused on the body. There is now a growing emphasis on the mind. At ActiveHealth we take this a step further, understanding that we must honor the mind, body and spirit in our work with members. Our spirit, that invisible string that pulls us and connects us to each other, is crucial to whole person health. This is at the center of everything we do at ActiveHealth and I look forward to continuing to champion this on a larger scale.

As the year comes to an end, it’s natural to look back on what we’ve accomplished and to begin to set goals for the coming year. The more I learn about our staff, and the more clients I meet, the more energized I am about being part of this team and about what we’ll accomplish together in 2023. We all share the common goal to help people create a vision of health that honors the lessons of the past while embracing a healthier future.

I wish you all a happy holiday season and the very best for a healthy new year.