The current Covid 19 pandemic will bring significant short-term and long-term changes to the way people interact with the healthcare system. Short-term changes include delaying of elective procedures, an overall decrease in utilization, and a shift in the places of service. Long-term, we will likely see the shift in the places of service continue, with telehealth utilization becoming more and more widespread.
The last few months of claims data look very different from the past, as behaviors have significantly changed and will continue to change into 2021 and the coming years. Organizations that leverage traditional data models around cost rely on assumptions that the past can be used to predict what will happen in the future. But with the disruption of COVID, many of them become obsolete, while others will need to be adjusted.
At the core of Nascate’s models and products is a proprietary metric called Healthcare Days – a rich, person-centric utilization metric that carries information about a person’s healthcare journey, behaviors and their treatment burden. While it correlates with cost and other accepted utilization measures, it is also resilient to a lot of the changes in behaviors brought by Covid 19 that are dependent on site of service details and or costs.
Another advantage in current times, comes with the disruption brought by Covid 19 to the healthcare system and the effects on attribution, which include a decrease in overall utilization and changes in how people seek care (i.e. increase in telemedicine utilization). Nascate’s attribution method offers the advantage of relying on relationships that were established in the past over a long period of time and include telemedicine. Traditional methods, on the other hand rely on recent utilization that might be non-existing or not an accurate representation of the true behaviors, and often do not include telemedicine. In practice this means that Nascate can get even more members attributed and more continuity of attribution, while traditional methods attribute less members and have less stability over time.