By Heidi M. Wilson, Director of HIE Services
January 22, 2025
While Connecticut is ranked as one of the healthiest states in the nation, gaps in care still exist, impacting our hospitals and providers and ultimately patients. In 2022, Medicare penalized 25 hospitals in Connecticut for high readmission rates, with the most common causes among Medicare patients being septicemia, heart failure, and diabetes with complications.
As Connecticut continues to advance its healthcare ecosystem, Connie's new tool, Population Explorer, can help close these care gaps and enhance proactive patient care. Designed to support providers’ patient populations, Population Explorer provides real-time data insights, empowering them to facilitate early interventions and targeted support especially for chronic condition patient populations.
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Leveraging Connections to Drive Proactive Care
Population Explorer offers enhanced flexibility to users. This powerful tool consolidates a patient's data into a single encounter, allowing providers and healthcare staff to seamlessly track patients throughout their healthcare journey and stay updated on their latest activity. When opening the Connie Portal, Population Explorer is conveniently displayed on the right-hand side, providing users with immediate access to up to six months of patient history. By clicking on a specific patient encounter, you can access a snapshot of the patient’s last five encounters in the system.
Population Explorer utilizes data from Connie’s network and the CRISP Event Notification Delivery (CEND) Solution to provide real-time updates on patient population encounters and statuses. Think of CEND as the behind-the-scenes engine that processes real-time patient data. It pulls in current information from encounters and matches it with an organization's patient list. The result is what you see in Population Explorer: real-time updates about patient encounters and statuses.
For instance, if a patient has recently been discharged from a hospital, Population Explorer will share that information with their care team. This can trigger follow-up care, thereby reducing the risk of readmission.
Armed with real-time notifications and a comprehensive history of patient encounters, providers can use Population Explorer to track whether their patients are receiving essential care.
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Clinical Use of Population Explorer
By assisting providers in identifying patients for follow-up care, Population Explorer promotes more timely and decisive action. Studies have shown that proactive follow-ups reduce readmission rates, which significantly enhances overall health outcomes. Population Explorer is designed to be a solution for timely interventions, ensuring patients get care when it matters most.
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Key Features for Population Explorer Include:
Encounter History: The tool now automatically collects a patient’s encounter history. Clicking on an individual encounter gives users the option to view their six-month encounter history as well as other key details like medication history without having to toggle manually through encounters. | Seamless Clinical Information Access: The new intra-portal access feature provides enhanced access to clinical information and bypasses unnecessary clicks. Now, just right click on a patient encounter and navigate directly to the clinical data for a patient. |
Accessibility and Review: Clinicians using Population Explorer can view and export the latest encounters of the patients on their panel in just a few clicks. | Filtering for Clarity: New filtering tools provide improved ease of use and can quickly filter available data in an encounter based on specific inquiries. |
Coming Soon: Exciting updates, like logic-based alerts (such as those for colonoscopies and mammograms), are in the works to be added to Population Explorer.
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Population Explorer Snapshots
When opening the Connie Portal, Population Explorer is displayed on the right-hand side, showing the most recent patient encounters.
Click into the Population Explorer widget to open the full tool, including the Detail View shown below. Here, you can find more information about your patients and their recent encounters.
Toggle to the Table View to see more details from encounters at a glance. Within the Population Explorer, you can add filters to browse between encounter type, patient class, and more.
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Get Help Managing Your Patients
With its focus on actionable insights, Population Explorer makes it easier for providers to monitor post-encounter needs effectively. It streamlines the care management process, saving valuable time, reducing the burden of manual tracking, and ultimately leading to better patient engagement and quality of care.
Population Explorer’s ability to deliver a comprehensive view of unique patient populations enables providers to prioritize which patients need attention most urgently. This holistic approach simplifies the tracking process and care continuity process, supporting providers in their ability to administer proactive patient management and ensuring timely outreach during crucial periods for better patient outcomes across Connecticut.
To learn how Population Explorer can help your healthcare organization deliver more timely follow-ups and support improved health outcomes, email info@connieCT.org or call 860-418-7001.
 | Heidi Wilson is the HIE Services Director for Connie. She has more than 20 years of experience in comprehensive, community-based, participatory planning and has worked with a wide range of entities, including UN agencies, international NGOs, local government agencies, community-based and faith-based organizations. She earned a master of science in development management from American University and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland). |