MRT Innovations in Social Determinants of Health Initiative

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Q1 Please provide your contact information below.

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Q2 Please describe your company or organizations overall goals and mission.

Vision Statement

Health Migration Consulting, Inc., endeavors to revolutionize the healthcare industry by adopting a holistic approach to healthcare by migrating from our current platform that focuses on care to a platform that focuses on health. This paradigm shift can be accomplished by integrating oral healthcare, a predictor of future illnesses, with medical care. Through the use of shared data, an individual can develop a personalized health plan with their physician to diminish the possibility of future disease.

Mission Statement

Health Migration Consulting, Inc., is committed to transforming healthcare by migrating from a platform of care to a platform of health by providing tools and services needed to foster greater accountability, collaboration and integration among patients, providers, payers and policy.

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Q4 Innovation Executive Summary. Please describe the innovation, and how it addresses the social determinants of health. Please identify how the innovation addresses the 6 innovation criteria (i.e. ROI, scalability, feasibility, evidence–based support for innovation, relevance to the Medicaid population and speed to market).

A New Vision for Healthcare

Good health takes guidance, effort, and continuous monitoring. A person who wants to live well with diabetes will need to eat a proper diet, get regular exercise and receive timely feedback about how they are doing. However, maintaining their good health will be hard because social determinants, the situations, and factors that shape attitudes, knowledge and behaviors. In our society, we are encouraged to eat junk food, and as a result, two in three adults are considered to be overweight or obese. We worry about our health problems when they get out of control, instead of trying to prevent them. Parents add to this dilemma by loving their children with snack food and passing on their harmful behaviors to their children. Our community leaders are no better since their unhealthy images are poor examples for the young to follow. As a result of our poor health management habits, the annual healthcare cost in 2012 was estimated to be almost four trillion dollars, and since then it has risen to a new peak in 2017 of approximately ten thousand dollars per person *.

The Government and other Payers have voiced their concern over poor healthcare outcomes and escalating cost by asking Providers to demonstrate more value for their Care. State Departments of Health have challenged hospitals to decrease re–admissions and to reduce the use of Emergency Room for primary care. However, several factors make this difficult to achieve including an unhealthy population with large groups of uninsured, poor health management by consumers who do not understand the impact of their habits on their health, and a healthcare system that focuses on fixing health problems instead of preventing them. Patients return to hospitals because they have insufficient feedback about the habits that made them sick in the first place. Healthcare´s efforts to enhance the processes that provide Care will always fall short of its goals unless Consumers are guided to become “partners” rather than “patients.”

Educating consumers to become more responsible health managers is needed to get value for our healthcare dollars. But, health education alone will not achieve the desired goals because knowledge alone is no match to the pressure of social determinants that shape attitudes, habits, and behaviors. We already have programs that encourage people to embrace healthy diets, refrain from smoking and limit alcohol use; but the power of advertising and other social determinants make it difficult for these programs to work. Education programs must also provide feedback to Healthcare about how well consumers are following its advice. Without feedback, and as long as the population continues to practice poor health management without consequence and then turn to the Healthcare to correct the problems when they occur, the annual cost of care will continue to rise in America.

For Healthcare to counter the effect of these social determinants, it must start education early, continuously monitor progress, acquire measures that corroborate the quality of health management of Consumers and share the data across Healthcare. This effort will ensure that harmful habits are prevented or at least discovered early so that health problems are less expensive to address. Oral Health can play a pivotal role in solving these core problems in Healthcare by providing a path to a more responsible consumer and a more knowledgeable medical practitioner. This opportunity arises because diseases of the mouth are the most common chronic illness*.

Ninety percent of the body’s diseases first show signs and symptoms in the mouth*. Also, we can first detect one hundred and twenty medical conditions by examination of the mouth, throat, and neck *. And, as we all know, earlier detection means earlier treatment at lower costs. According to the 2016 findings of the Integrated Health Care Report, screening for chronic conditions in dental offices could reduce U.S. health care costs by up to $102.6 million per year or up to $32.72 per person screened *.

Beginning in the first year of life and continuing throughout life, monitoring oral health data will reflect the quality of health management; be it a child or an adolescent, an adult, or a senior. Quality health habits and lifestyle choices will impact oral health, systemic health, care management and quality of life. So, collecting information about how well consumers manage their oral health, validating those findings with a dental examination and sharing this information with Primary Care and Payers will give Healthcare a chance to anticipate problems long before they become expensive to fix and allow Payers to reward good behavior in consumers which will also lower costs. Additionally, we can share Health Measures with Policy to create forward–looking Health Policy Standards.

Health Migration Consulting Inc. (HMCI) is an organization committed to improving Health by providing tools and services to help Healthcare migrate from an industry that focuses on Care to an industry that focuses on Health. HMCI works to address the core problems in Healthcare by helping Consumers to become responsible health managers, providing new data to improve collaboration across Healthcare and encouraging integration to improve efficiency and reduce cost.

ROI: Innovation cost – $12.00 per person per year. Benefits:

1. Consumers receive personalized health guidance
2. Consumers provide feedback about their health management
3. Dentist provide data to confirm consumer health management status
4. Physicians receive data to improve collaboration
5. Payers receive data to reduce cost and improve value
6. Policy receives data to improve best practices

Scalability: As computers and other web based platforms are accessible, there is no limit to the number of users of the technology.

Feasibility: The technology is in already in use. The limitation is the willingness of consumers to use the technology, which can be solved by the payer requiring everyone to use the technology

Evidence based support for innovation:

1. The technology is based on the impact of every day activity and behaviors on oral health and the recognition of oral – systemic connections (e.g. periodontal infections and chronic health problems such as diabetes, cardiac disease and obesity)
2. The technology is based the recognition of oral – systemic connections (e.g. periodontal infections and chronic health problems such as diabetes, cardiac disease and obesity)
3. Consumer use: An employer benefit vendor – over 1000% increase users in 24 months, a high school in Brooklyn New York (use started in 2014) will extend invitation to neighborhood community to use the innovation this fall

*Integrated Health Care Insights: A Series. The advantages of integrating employee dental and health care benefits data: Key findings from the 2016 Integrated Health Care Report. Specialtybenefits.info/integrated healthcare

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