Timothy G. Ferris, MD, is senior vice president for population health management at Partners HealthCare in Boston, He is trained in both internal medicine and pediatrics, He is a practicing primary care physician and also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Ferris holds degrees from Middlebury College, Oxford University, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.

We talked with him recently about the new Population Health Management Center he will oversee at Partners HealthCare, the partnership the healthcare organization has with data warehouse and analytics company Health Catalyst and how population health management has changed over the past 20 years or so.

Q: It sounds like you were in population health management before it was the buzz term that it is today.

A: Yes. I never called it that. I just called it cost and quality. I've been focused on this set of issues for two decades, and it's very fortuitous that the current imperative for bending the cost curve and improving quality came along when it did.

Q: Was population health management considered before now? It sounds like you certainly were considering it, you just didn't call it that.

A: I think people have been thinking about cost and quality for a long time, and so, every decade had to have its phrase. The phrase was 'managed care' in the '90s, and it was pay-for-performance in the 2000s, and now it's population health management. There are some significant themes that tie those decades together. Some people focus on the discontinuities between them and what's different. Other people focus on the switch theme. What's really different this time between population health and managed care in the '90s is there are really three differences. One is we have much better IT and analytics. In the '90s we thought we were electronic, but we really weren't.

Now everything is electronic, and so we have access to huge amounts of data. The data is real time. That really makes things better. In the 90s we were largely using claims to do management and that was just untenable. The other thing that's different is we actually know more about what we need to make care better. We know that 50 percent of costs are constituted in 5 percent of patients – that if want to do something about bending the cost curve, you better focus on that 5 percent of really sick, complex patients and do a better job of coordinating their care. I'm not sure we knew that in the '90s. It certainly wasn't appreciated widely.

The third thing that's different this time around is the federal government is in the game in a way that they weren't in the '90s. Secretary Burwell's in the New England Journal in January that we are moving to value-based care. It's not clear exactly what the mechanism is and what the timetable is. But you providers should get ready for this and be planning for this, because this is coming. That has provided great motivation to this effort between the '90s and now. Those statements make me optimistic that, you know, third time's a charm.

Q: How will this Partners HealthCare partnership with Health Catalyst benefit Partners' population health management initiatives?

A: I think it's going to benefit us in a few ways. First of all going to Health Catalyst's core competency around analytics, we've been working with them for three years. We have a very good relationship, and we want to expand that relationship around analytics. There's so much more we could be doing with the data that we have, and we very much look forward to working with Health Catalyst to enable greater use of analytics within our system.

So, that's one piece of it. The second piece is really around the collaboration around our population health information management programs. We're excited about working with them in further development. Despite our successes in population health management, we are nowhere near done innovating and demonstrating our ability to move the needle on quality and cost. Partnering with Health Catalyst allows us an opportunity to share those practices much more widely as we continue to innovate – in a way that we don't have the core competency to do.

Q: Tell me about the population health center you will be managing. Did it come from the partnership with Health Catalyst?

A: Yes. Our efforts on population health management have become more and more organized. The center is just the next step for us in organizing our population health management activities, giving them a corporate home and spreading the participation in that center all across all of hospitals and physician practices and post-acute and nursing home  – all of the different parts of our organization at Partners HealthCare. So the center is a next step for us to observe our commitment to this set of issues and how well organized we are to execute on improving healthcare.

Q: When you speak about outcomes transformation, what do you envision?

A: This is what we're all shooting for. I'll give you an example. In our priority of care coordination program, we demonstrated through a national demonstration project that we reduced mortality in our sickest patients by adding care coordinators, identifying them statistically, working with their primary care physicians with care coordinators, and we had a 4 percent mortality reduction. That is improving outcomes. No one can argue that's not the best possible thing that we could be doing. We want to spread that to other areas. Another example of how we're focused on improving outcome, is we are collecting from our patients – patient-reported outcomes. It's another hot are right now. We're asking our patients when they come in a series of questions.

Q: What would be the best outcome from your expanded collaboration with Health Catalyst?

A: I think it's pretty simple – that our ability to improve care and lower cost at our own organization improves, and through this collaboration Health Catalyst's ability to spread the things that they're learning at Partners to their other partnerships. We also enjoy learning from Health Catalyst's other partners. Basically. Health Catalyst becomes a vehicle for sharing best practices.