The nation’s nearly 80 million baby boomers are about to enter their peak years of chronic disease and are set to become an unprecedented driver of health care costs. New technology, however, promises to enable a transformation in the delivery of care, putting patients at the center of care systems that engage and empower them and their families, directly connecting patients to care-givers, and personalizing services in response to patients’ unique needs, preferences, and values. Such care systems also offer the promise of strengthening an understaffed, underresourced home health care industry. Leveraging technology, disease management (DM), and home health have the opportunity to work together to more efficiently and effectively meet the needs of a rapidly aging society through better coordinated care that reduces avoidable hospital readmissions and other adverse events. This is achieved by positively affecting such things as home safety (e.g., falls), medication adherence, nutrition, and heart failure.

W hile the accomplishments of our industry over the past decade have been spectacular, it is hard to conclude that they have been sufficient to bend the trend of health care costs to the degree our markets and our country require. The simple explanation for this fact is that there is only so much we can do after people get sick and, as we all know, the incidence of chronic disease in America is approaching epidemic proportions. As a result, our markets and our industry have recognized the importance of solutions designed to keep healthy people healthy and to reduce health risk associated with poor lifestyle choices, in addition to, and fully integrated with, our traditional offerings. Only with effective solutions aimed at individuals before they get sick can we hope to deprive our national chronic disease engine of fuel, thereby assuring our customers of improved health and reduced costs for their populations to a degree that both matters and is sustainable.As we evolve from the care-focused disease management model of the past decade to the integrated population health model our markets demand today, a similar evolution will be required in the types of data we collect, how we analyze them, and how we use them to create solutions and to evaluate their effectiveness. For historic disease management solutions, reliance on transactional data was sufficient, despite the fact that we could never agree on a common way to use it to evaluate performance.Future solutions, focused on the healthy and the at-risk in addition to those already ill, require the development of data sets that, heretofore, did not exist and against which intervention models have not been designed. Just as traditional solutions, while effective and of critical continuing importance, have been shown to be insufficient by themselves to meet the market's broad objectives, so too traditional economic and health care measures, while still important, are no longer adequate to assess, engage, design solutions for, and compare performance against this broader population.To address this opportunity, The Gallup Organization and Healthways, Inc. have entered into a 25-year relationship to collect the necessary data, develop the requisite evaluation tools, engineer new intervention solutions, and report on results. Recognizing that sponsors are really looking for transparent and credible metrics to evaluate more than just the health, utilization, and direct cost of their populations, the new instrument measures 6 validated domains of wellbeing that provide deep insights into factors (in addition to physical health) that may be driving both direct cost and the indirect costs of lost or impaired productivity.