Todd Hubler
Michael Barbouche was surprised to learn that his wife, a doctor, had no easy way to analyze how effective the treatments are that she prescribes for her patients.
“I kept asking her, ‘What are you doing to take better care of your patients with hypertension or diabetes?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about; I don’t have a list of those patients, I can’t see that stuff.’”
In order to help doctors like his wife provide better care, Barbouche launched Forward Health Group in 2009 to make sure medical data was available to health care providers in the United States.
While doctors can access records of a single patient, they don’t have an easy way to compile data on trends, identify which patients might benefit from new medicines or see which treatments tend to be most or least effective. It’s a problem that Forward Health Group is trying to solve.
Barbouche, who has a background in health information technology, explains that the company’s software, PopulationManager, is like Google Earth, letting doctors zoom in or out on a given population of patients to see who is healthy and who isn’t.
“If you’re an insurance company, you don’t need to know everything about your members every day, but you need to know that they’re moving in the right direction,” he says. “If you’re a physician you need to know how your patients are doing, but maybe with more acute focus on those that aren’t doing well.”
Barbouche sees his company as being a crucial player in the challenges facing the U.S. health care system. More people now have coverage under the Affordable Care Act, and the federal government is trying to curb incentivized care, which rewards doctors and hospitals for the number of tests and treatments they perform, rather than how good they are at keeping people healthy. So the industry is looking for ways to measure that job performance. PopulationManager does just that — creating report cards of doctors, clinics and hospitals at every level of the health care system.
“How do we improve nursing home care, how do we improve depression, how do we improve anything if we don’t even know where we’re starting from?” Barbouche says. “The era we enter as a country is one where we’re going to see for the first time where we are in terms of health care. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty, and accepting that will be hard, but figuring out how to move the needle will be harder.”
In order to move the needle, Barbouche points to minimizing health care costs, something he says have gotten out of control. “The costs have been astronomical and...the care has been bad,” says Barbouche.
Barbouche is definitely correct about the costs. In 2013, health care spending in the U.S. reached $2.9 trillion, or $9,255 per person.
“There’s this pendulum of risk that used to be entirely on the insurance company, and now they’re moving that risk squarely over the heads of the doctors and hospitals,” Barbouche says. “Yet, no matter your coverage, we are going to end up paying more and more every year because insurance companies transfer [costs] to the hospitals and health systems, and hospitals and health systems will begin to transfer it to us.”
Forward Health Group hopes to make responsibility equal across all health care stakeholders by bringing data to the forefront of the conversation.
Says Barbouche: “The foundation of the work that we do, the foundation of the data we deliver is precisely around tackling this very hard challenge of how do we begin to buy health care in the right way.”