March 11th saw the World Health Organization (WHO) declare a pandemic. This marked a change that immediately impacted our daily lives – our world has a new normal. In it, we need to rapidly adapt to change and healthcare data can show us what to tackle first.
Our ability to understand risk and anticipate spread of the novel coronavirus is inextricably linked to rapidly evolving data. What we know changes swiftly and yet our lives cannot completely stop; businesses still need to function. Now more than ever, we need to harness health analytics to guide companies through ongoing data-driven decisions as we react, recover, re-open, and plan for 2022.
A COVID-19 Analytics Agenda
HDMS recognized the opportunity to leverage our clinical and analytic experts to offer content to support companies that extend even beyond our own client base. We created an Analytics Agenda and shared supporting resources to best leverage health analytics to support your organization.
We recommended a framework of COVID-19 analytics that included these key focus areas in three phases:
- Acute: quantify your population vulnerabilities for strategic planning and resource management
- Short term: understand COVID costs, quantify cost offsets due to delayed or reduced care. Use this to re-plan the current benefit year, track wellness issues, and perform cost modeling for 2021
- New normal: use COVID insights to tune benefit plans for 2022, manage wellness in our new world, accelerate good health and prevention
