Industry Voices—An Inside Look at Analyzing Coronavirus Risk Inside a Health Data Network

We got the call. Riverside County, one of the most active regions in our health data network, was asking for help with identifying people in their community who most critically need help during the COVID-19 pandemic.

From my time at the Office of the National Coordinator to Aledade to the past three years at Manifest MedEx, this is the call I’ve been preparing for—the opportunity to rapidly use health information to help people in need.

As a county, Riverside didn’t have an attributed population in our system the way that a health plan would have a defined list of members. We started by pulling together a list of all the people with health records in our system that had a zip code in Riverside County, which was about 850,000 of the county’s 2.4 million residents.

From there, we identified the subset of the population that had been diagnosed with an acute or chronic condition related to COVID-19 risk over the past year (conditions like diabetes, respiratory conditions, etc.). That brought the total down to roughly 175,000 residents.

Riverside was open to a fairly large catchment as they were first planning to use automated phone calls for the first round of outreach, but together we decided to be even more targeted on who had the highest risk of hospitalization. We were able to look at claims data, ambulatory data and the number of patients in the hospital.

Read full article by Erica Galvez, Chief Strategy Officer at Manifest MedEx, published in Fierce Healthcare.