Healthgrades

This week, Diana and I sat down with Dr. Brad Bowman and Nickey Scarborough, of Healthgrades. They’re a healthcare IT company that provides several valuable services to the community at large as well as to the healthcare industry. One of Healthgrades’ core offerings relates to transparency and healthcare consumerism. When you need to find a physician to address a particular health need from primary care to a specialist, the company’s website allows the patient and/or their family to conduct a search of their database.

The Healthgrades platform utilizes a number of available data sources to compile a match score that gives a measure of confidence a particular physician has sufficient experience and positive outcomes to be considered as a viable option for providing your care. You can search by provider name, specialty, condition, or procedure, along with location/radius.

Your results will give a list of possible providers, each with a rank for volume of this given procedure they’ve performed, along with a report of any sanctions or board actions that have been taken. Similarly, Healthgrades provides prospective patients with access to outcomes and patient satisfaction data across the gamut of service lines and procedures they offer. Patients can review a given hospital’s rank and compare it to the national average for that procedure.

But, these useful services are only scratching the surface for what Healthgrades is able to do for health systems and hospitals. The company is able to use a wide array of readily-available health and consumer data for patients in a given service area to give valuable predictive insights around outcomes for a given health problem. Things such as number of rooms in your home, whether it’s rented or mortgaged, how financially stable a family is, along with buying habits combined with numerous other data points can give surprisingly accurate pictures of what a given population’s tendency toward ER re-admissions or poor outcomes/compliance with care.

Through an engagement with Healthgrades, using their population analytics, a health system can be very strategic in their marketing efforts to help make that revenue spend be far more likely to help the system achieve its goals and deliver a higher level of care/outcomes.

Special Guests:

Brad Bowman, MD, Chief Medical Officer, of Healthgrades