Palliative Illness Management uses predictive analytics to shift the center of care to the home or community.
The healthcare industry is scrambling to adapt to senior policyholders' needs, particularly the serious illnesses that are more likely to strike older patients.
Turn-Key Health, of Philadelphia, is an advanced illness management company that uses predictive analytics to deploy community-based palliative care teams and identify individuals earlier in the disease trajectory.
Turn-Key Health recently launched Palliative Illness Management (PIM), which integrates specialized advanced illness assessments and services in conjunction with supporting medical resources.
The data-driven and evidence-based program will help payers avoid costly, inappropriate interventions and care that is fragmented, uncoordinated, or inadequate, according to the company.
PIM will be especially beneficial for individuals whose illness might otherwise go undetected until late in the progression of disease, company President Greer Myers wrote in a blog on the company website.
"For payer-driven population health programs, this approach has a significant impact on the overall economic healthcare burden, mitigating patient and caregiver financial consequences and improving member/patient satisfaction," he wrote.
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The program uses affiliations and partnerships with community-based palliative care teams and organizations across the country, tapping into the expertise and synergies of existing resource, Greer explained.
This specialized approach, which includes conducting progressive and difficult conversations around quality of life in the remaining months of life, helps payers save money and provide the best quality of care that meets the patient's wishes.
"Individuals often suffer through unnecessary, costly and even harmful treatments, despite overriding expert opinion that when patients have a terminal illness and the outlook for recovery dims, more treatment does not equal better care," Greer wrote.
"The financial and social consequences extend to family caregivers who spend nearly 66 hours a week providing care to a loved one during the person's last year of life. This erodes earning potential and imposes a profound economic toll."
The PIM model shifts the center of care to the home or community, placing the focus on care coordination and patient-centric services, Greer stated.
PIM generates outcomes and results that are measured and valued at a population level, and by optimizing pre-and post-acute care it can reduce hospitalizations, re-admissions and number of ICU days, resulting in a drop in the average claims cost per member per month.