3M Health Information Systems recently announced an agreement with Cerner to use 3M Patient-focused Episodes Software with Cerner's HealtheIntent population health management platform. Providers will be able to view the landscape of a patient's documented conditions to help define an episode of care, while analyzing costs and expected resource use. 

The conventional approach to defining an episode is to focus on the services related to a single disease rather than the patient as a whole. HealtheIntent will be enhanced to take a patient-centric episode approach, by using a measure for payment and quality that represents the treatment a patient experienced across care settings. 

"Cerner continues to advance the industry with innovations in population health management. The 3M software further expands the breadth of our population health management offerings to give our clients solutions and content they can use to more effectively manage health and care as well as costs," says Dr. Bharat Sutariya, vice president and CMO of population health at Cerner.

3M Patient-focused Episodes Software defines over 500 episodes of patient care spanning inpatient and outpatient encounters as well as chronic and acute diseases. It accounts for patients with multiple conditions and complex health histories, and produces clinically meaningful, risk-adjusted episodes for opportunity and intervention analysis.

"An episode-based payment system that is designed around the patient is the next logical step in the evolution of health care payment systems," says JaeLynn Williams, president of 3M Health Information Systems. "By creating a defined time period, individual clinicians work as a unified team toward a single, clearly stated goal—to carry each patient across the episode finish line as efficiently and excellently as possible." 

HealtheIntent's enterprise data warehouse, HealtheEDW, will support bundled payments, compare provider costs and provide classification such as diagnosis-related group, a concept widely accepted by health care professionals. Providers will receive a comprehensive view and information to support evaluating the effectiveness of care, predicting costs, and refining patient treatment processes to improve outcomes.

3M methodologies are used throughout health care for quality outcomes measurement, risk analysis, and population health management. State Medicaid agencies, hospital associations, and payer-provider collaboratives in more than 30 US states rely on 3M methodologies for comparative reporting of hospital quality and as the basis for designing new value-based health care payment models.