Christopher Stanley, M.D., MBA, on the early population healt wins of Henry Ford Health's Populance

Before Henry Ford Health formed Populance, its population health subsidiary, care management across the Detroit-based system was scattered. A physician practice, the health plan, a hospital and a given geography might each have its own care manager, using different tools and processes, and sometimes all of them contacted the same patient. In an interview with Managed Healthcare Executive (MHE), Christopher Stanley, M.D., MBA, president of Populance, said that centralizing that work has been one Populance’s early successes.

Centralizing care management depended partly on bringing some consistency to data collection and some other processes, explained Stanley, who recently joined the MHE editorial advisory board. The result, Stanley said, has been roughly double the number of patients contacted with the same number of staff, because work was no longer being duplicated. The goal was not to cut care managers but to reach more people with the ones it had, and a single approach also meant the work could be measured. “The first and easy step, frankly, is just doing things consistently,” Stanley said.

With better data in place, Populance also found that musculoskeletal problems were a major driver of cost and utilization in the populations where the system carries downside financial risk, Stanley told MHE. It paired that finding with a virtual physical therapy startup founded by a physician in Henry Ford’s medical group and has since enrolled thousands of patients with back, knee and hip pain. “We’re being proactive as opposed to somebody telling us we needed to do it,” Stanley said. He said the program saves about $10,000 in medical spending per enrolled patient over the following year by helping patients avoid hospitalization, surgery and post-surgical therapy, and that patients end up functioning about as well as they would have after surgery. A diabetes program that combines one-on-one and group sessions is saving thousands of dollars per enrolled patient compared with a matched cohort, he said.

Populance is taking care to measure savings from its program, Stanley said. Rather than relying on pre-post or historical trend comparisons, it is using matched cohorts, drawing on Henry Ford Health’s academic mission. He noted, though, the trade-off between academic-type research and sharing findings quickly.