Population health management is needed today if employers, health plans or ACOs want to manage rising healthcare costs by keeping members healthy. Healthcare managers need to pay different levels and types of attention to different groups of people inside the populations they manage. Once people are put into different groups based on the kind of care they need (wellness management, chronic disease management, acute care, etc.), the members in each group need to be managed in such a way that they can be moved in and out of the cohort at any time. Healthcare-solution providers have struggled for years to develop such dynamic cohort-ing features. Many have promised but none have delivered a truly dynamic cohort-ing tool.

Better late than never. Deerwalk has come up with one now.

One of the biggest problems people find in evaluating outcomes for programs/care management activities is the movement of members in and out of programs. People who have been in the program for the entire measurement period are included with people who have only been in the program for a short period of time. That leads to potential skewing of the results. With cohorts, the user can create a cohort of program members at the start date of the measurement period and has control over who will be allowed to be added to the cohort during the measurement period. This allows for a controlled sample to use in measuring outcomes and program effectiveness over time .

Deerwalk's cohort module has all the features that our clients wish for. They are:

1. Create a COHORT based on utilization criteria, disease condition, drug usage profiles, quality gaps and cost and risk profile (multiple criteria can be applied together)
2. Dynamically add and drop members in and out of a cohort when a given criteria is not met
3. Compute healthcare utilization profiles for a cohort and trend the profiles over time
4. Compare a cohort against the book of business or against another group or cohort
5. A cohort can be private or public inside our product

We are very excited about the cohort module inside our data analytics platform Makalu. This is the crown jewel of our product. We believe healthcare analytics platforms without real-time dynamic cohort-ing feature are of no use if you are in the business of population health management.