Today we’re going to tour the ballpark and have a go in the batting cage. But first…

Shorter Bob Pearl, CEO Permanente Medical Group: Our docs are convinced we care about outcomes. Other people’s docs (other IPA and med groups) have doubts.

Chronic care management is an IT intensive, patient outreach intensive, 24/7/365 process that’s really tough, but need a whole system. We have to track and predict bad incidents. One example is tracking bi-polar people every day in order to predict a manic incident. But the system needs to track all patients –those with chronic illness and those at risk of getting one (which is everyone else!). The system needs to track everyone all the time and find the failures, and report them out for both intervention and later analysis.

Right now 500K in the KP system are being watched by a care manager, but that 500K is not a static population — and they are trying to get them out of that system back to baseline. Everyone everywhere needs constant prompts and that’s where KP’s heading. (Implication is that every one else needs to get on board or they won’t be around…)