As “population health” continues to be on the minds and priority lists of healthcare professionals and vendors alike, the conversation cannot take place without recognizing a new population – one requiring perhaps even more attention than the “very sick” or the “pretty healthy” populations because of the price tag attached. The “Emergent-Risk” population, if left untreated, could cost the U.S. healthcare system an additional $80-280 billion a year.
DPS Health, a provider of digital health self-management, announced that effective immediately it has renamed the company Canary Health to better align with its mission to engage consumers to arrest the trajectory of chronic illness. Canary Health enables health plans, provider systems, and employers to impact the health of the Emergent-Risk; a group now comprising 25%-30% of the U.S. adult population.
Made up of approximately 80 million consumers with pre-chronic and early-stage chronic conditions, mismanaging this population with traditional Wellness or Disease management programs used by most insurance companies could lead to a lifetime of compounding chronic conditions, compounding declines in quality of life and compounding increases in cost of care. What’s required is a unique combination of digital self-management tools that effectively engage these individuals in their own healthcare, while delivering on improved communication with healthcare providers.
To address the clinical and financial risks of prechronic and early-stage chronic illness, Canary Health offers a new kind of population health management service, designed to manage the emergent-risk population, from outreach to outcomes. The service puts consumers back at the center of their health self-management journeys by enabling healthcare organizations to:
– Identify and segment the emergent-risk population
– Analyze the trajectories of compounding chronic conditions and their impacts
– Deliver evidence-based digital health interventions for lifestyle, stress and condition self-management
– Impact the population by improving health outcomes, slowing the progression of existing conditions, and preventing the compounding of chronic conditions and compounding costs of care
Concurrent with the launch of its population management service, Canary Health announced that it will expand from engaging a segment to managing the entire 87,000 emergent-risk member population for longtime customer, the Government Employees Health Association (GEHA).
According to Kathy Ross, GEHA Vice President of Clinical Operations, “For some time, we have offered two types of programs: wellness programs for our healthy population and disease management programs for our very sick population. While working closely with Canary Health over the last six years, we were able to significantly reduce the rate of adding new chronic conditions and the net utilization. These were two key factors in our decision to invest in a third strategy for health: digital health self-management for the emergent-risk population.”
