Greg Reinecke, President & Co-Founder, GeoDimensional Decision Group Today’s Value Based Purchasing programs in healthcare require physician practices and hospitals to understand and proactively aggregate and analyze data to manage their patient populations. When ardent consultant, demographer, and geographer Greg Reinecke, realized the requirement for technology-based, data-driven, location-informed assistance to corporate decision-making, he and two associates created GeoDD—a firm offering affordable solutions to industries that require a deep understanding of populations to enhance their decision-making process. “We focus on Population Health Management (PHM) in healthcare because of the volume-to-value shift,” says Reinecke, President, GeoDD. He continues, “The sector we target is more interested in getting information easily, quickly, and economically than the technology behind it.”
The firm’s flagship healthcare offering, VBPMaster™, is a complete PHM solution which requires no hardware installation; it is a subscription service with a low monthly fee. “Our interface is so simple that customers can get reports to their order with minimal clicks—no IT wizards or biostatisticians required,” elucidates Reinecke. VBPMaster gathers the data, a provider needs to manage the population proactively and analyzes it in terms of relevant payer, and internal provider metrics. The results are presented in a way that the provider can easily visualize, and GeoDD can customize the interface dashboards based on provider input. “When the data reveals a problem, our ‘bundled’ consultants are available to help the customer find the solution,” states Reinecke.
Our interface is so simple that customers can get reports to their order with minimal clicks
With the help of VBPMaster, users can gather and integrate social determinant information including non-clinical, non-care-delivery-related data such as food availability, education, community and social context, neighborhood and physical environment, and economic stability as well as EHR, claims, and revenue cycle data. The population is then mapped physically and the social determinants are overlaid to display the physical location of patients. “So, for example, VBPMaster can take the population map and overlay it with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality data— giving users the ability to quickly grasp whether air quality is inducing Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in a specific population,” remarks Reinecke.
Reinecke described a use case in which a hospital in Pennsylvania needed to improve its COPD care process. It reached out to patients individually through care management programs, guiding them on using their inhalers properly. In spite of all this, the hospital still had many “Mystery Readmits” and was unable to identify the cause. VBPMaster consultants conducted a series of analyses which found that the patients lived close to an interstate highway that bisected the hospital’s service area. The highway had a lot of diesel traffic, and the trucks emitted fine particulates that could trigger an exacerbation. “Armed with this knowledge, the hospital could work with patients to minimize their exposure to the particulates,” Reinecke notes. “Patients could be asked to conduct all their business outside before 10 am. Patients could be transported to a community center located away from the highway when air quality deteriorated.”
Currently, GeoDD is focused on increasing the customer base of VBPMaster. The company is also planning to enhance the solution for use in other industry verticals. “We will continue to build relationships, think innovatively, be agile, and blend data and people to make better decisions,” concludes Reinecke.
