Surprises from the health data trenches

Sean Gallivan says he knows that he has to fight to keep your eyes from glazing over when he tells you what his company does.

Gallivan is the chief operating officer at Healthentic, a 6-year-old company that sells a “population health dashboard” — a system that employers, benefits brokers, benefits consultants, insurers or other customers can use to monitor the status of a group of people, such as an employer’s employees, a doctor’s patients or a health insurer’s policyholders.

Gallivan says many actual and potential customers are burning out on population monitoring systems because too many systems focus on indicators that are relatively easy to get but have too little to do with improving people’s health or lowering the cost of their care.

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The Healthentic dashboard is a little like a Google Analytics summary dashboard for people. It shows a population summary panel that indicates the size of the population, the population’s total health care costs for the reporting period, and the population’s per-member-per-month costs.

A second panel shows the percentage of the enrollees who appear to be healthy and their costs per month; the percentage who have preventable conditions and their costs per month; and the percentage who have chronic conditions and their cost per month.

A third panel shows trends in the percentage of enrollees with diabetes, high blood pressure, depression or low back pain who appear to be managing their conditions according to generally accepted standards.

Users can click through to get anonymized care utilization details. Healthentic tries to link information from different databases, so that analyzers can look at people in the population who have both diabetes and periodontal disease, or who are taking both drugs for depression and drugs for back pain.