This is the 3rd post in the Health Information Economy series. We are outlining a number of elements outlining a vision for a robust health information economy as we put together a submission for the Economist-Innocentive Health Information Economy Idea Challenge.
Measuring Health Improvement
As we discussed in the previous post, the fundamental value of health services are things that improve our health. As we define the foundations of a Health Information Economy, information that has intrinsic value includes:
- our current and future health status
- our current and future health-related capabilities
- the personal impact of any health product or service under consideration
- total cost of any health product or service utilized or under consideration
Having this information at an individual level enables the appropriate decisions to be made for each specific individual. In a rational system, one would expect that an aggregate of the decisions to improve the health of each individual would move the needle on a community level index.
Defining the Personal Vitality Score
The Personal Vitality Score is analogous to a “FICO” score for your health. It is a single number that synthesizes the various elements of your health status, risks, and capabilities into a number that goes up as your health improves and declines as your health deteriorates.
Today, we do not have a Personal Vitality Score to help us understand where we stand and how important potential interventions may be for us. The implication is that we are inundated with things that might save our life or may be wildly irrelevant, and yet we are told to “ask our doctor”. Since our doctor can’t keep all the relevant factors for you in his/her head, we often do not prioritize the interventions, tests, or activities that have a disproportionate impact on our health.
The requirements for an actionable Personal Vitality Score are the following:
- Dynamic: updates as our health status changes (for good and bad), and as new data comes out
- Auto-populating: data continually updated without need for additional data entry (e.g., accepts feeds)
- Accurate: take in enough relevant data points, with good enough processing algorithms, to appropriately report current and future health status
- Actionable: outline concrete things individuals can do to improve their status
- Comprehensive: takes into account elements spanning wellness to specific illnesses
Implications of a Personal Vitality Score
As we think about a health information economy, a Personal Vitality Score is one starting point in terms of creating the currencies that enable companies to capture the full value of the “healthstreams” produced for each individual and across populations. This becomes a foundational block for rewarding Accountable Care models, creating actionable “comparative effectiveness” maps for individuals facing treatment choices, and creates a currency and value curves for companies that want to make a business out of superior real-world impact.
