One year ago at the company’s annual investor’s conference, UnitedHealth Group first laid out plans to develop a fully portable individual health record (IHR) for its members.
At this year’s meeting, UnitedHealth Group CEO Dave Wichmann filled in a few more details about this initiative, which is being developed on the company’s Rally health and wellness platform.
Wichmann said the UnitedHealth plans to offer IHRs at no charge for all of its 50 million comprehensive benefits plan members across North and South America by the end of 2019 as a technology solution meant to improve patient experience, lower costs and improve outcomes. The platform will also be accessible by more than 1 million care providers during that time frame.
“Our goal with the IHR is to provide doctors and individuals with a deeply personalized 360 degree view on a person’s health … not dependent on any one system or network,” Wichmann said at the conference earlier this week.
A key part of the IHR’s function is not just providing a record of the patient’s past healthcare experiences, but “to suggest a path forward on the journey to better health.”
This means using data gleaned from the IHR to create better standards of care which can be developed by UnitedHealth Group’s provider division OptumCare. There’s also the potential of incorporating AI into the IHR system to suggest better clinical practices and diagnoses.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
UnitedHealth has made increasingly large bets to provide direct care to patients, including its nearly $5 billion bid to acquire the medical unit of dialysis provider DaVita Medical Group.
In his remarks, Wichmann also announced the acquisition of Seattle-based independent multidisciplinary physician group Polyclinic to supplement its clinical network in the market.
Other benefits of the IHR touted by the company include better identification of providers in the company’s network who meet higher quality and cost-efficiency guidelines, driving behavior change and better care outcomes through financial reward systems and speeding up the claims and prior authorization process for physicians.
One idea mentioned by Wichmann would be to create a consumer-centric “closed-loop health information exchange” which would allow healthcare professionals and patients to effectively and securely share medical information.
“We see the building of the IHR as one of the most transformative steps in significantly improving quality, eliminating practice pattern variation and driving consumer engagement in managing their health and modifiable lifestyle behaviors,” Wichmann said,
Earlier this month a beta version of the IHR has been rolled out to three of the company’s Accountable Care Organization partners and according to Wichmann, physicians have already used the technology to improve treatments for patients.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Steve Nelson drew a distinction between the company’s IHR and traditional EMRs in its ability to better and more efficiently ingest data from a variety of information sources.
The IHR is a core part of the company’s digital transformation as it looks to diversify its portfolio past its core function as a health insurer and into business lines as a healthcare services provider. Wichmann said UnitedHealth eventually plans to offer its IHR platform to other payer organizations.
According to Wichmann nearly 50 percent of the company’s 2019 earnings is expected to come from healthcare services.
Photo: turk_stock_photographer, Getty Images
