Xerox announced its acquisition of Healthy Communities Institute (HCI), developer of a cloud platform that provides socioeconomic and community health information to hospitals, public health agencies and community coalitions.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, however HCI’s management team and its employees will remain with the company.
HCI’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform centralizes proprietary, health care and community data to help hospitals and other health organizations manage population health.
“The CDC outlines four key determinants of population health: genetics, medical care, lifestyle and health behaviors, and physical and social environment. As a result of the acquisition, [Xerox subsidiary] Midas+ is now able to provide insights, solutions and services across 95 percent of those determinants of population health,” Justin Lanning, senior vice president and managing director of Midas+, told eWEEK. “Xerox clients will be able to identify at-risk populations, leading to timelier and personalized clinical interventions that will reduce costs and improve care.”
By tapping data derived from clinical visits, health care claims, and community-level assessments, health care providers and others can better understand community demographics, risk factors and disease distribution.
HCI supports more than 250 hospitals, public health organizations and community health and employer coalitions across 36 states and covers more than 100 million lives across the United States, and the company’s current clients include 75 public health departments at the city, county and state level.
“Society today expects all of their experiences to be personalized. Health care needs to meet patients where they are,” Lanning said. “So as reimbursement plans shift and any provider is asked to manage more risk, it’s more important than ever to engage their patients in a more personalized fashion.”
HCI’s data and insight will be integrated with Midas+’s Juvo Care Performance analytics platform, creating a repository for insight on factors that impact population health.
It will also provide socioeconomic and environmental context for individual clinical care information, a combination that creates a comprehensive view of patient care and puts evidence-based actionable recommendations into the hands of providers, with the aim of producing better health care outcomes.
Midas+ serves more than 2,200 health care provider facilities and specializes in workflow solutions, quality, regulatory management and actionable insights to improve patient care.
“Over the next few years, personalized actionable insights are going to become increasingly more important– especially as they’re derived from data across the spectrum of the social determinants of health,” Lanning said. “Social determinants of health are economic and social conditions that are shaped by the amount of money, power and resources that people have.”
He explained that each of these determinants affects factors like housing status and level of education that are related to health outcomes.
“As the health care system shifts from a fee-for-service to an outcomes-based payment model, with medical care being only a small percent of the determinant of a person’s health, the industry will need to look at all of the other factors, like genetics, health behaviors, social and societal characteristics, that will impact outcomes for that particular patient,” Lanning said.
