Health informatics with integrity.   In the health improvement and disease management industry today, there is a common concern in that there is no standard for measuring ROI. Because of this, it is said that anybody can make numbers say anything. At Cardium Health, we are dedicated to working together with our customers to understand what the numbers mean and continuously raise the bar to achieve verifiably greater results.

Our philosophy to do whatever it takes to meet or exceed our customers’ expectations extends to the gathering, analysis, and communication of data to demonstrate real results. Our reporting process is made up of two components:

1. Data Collection
We capture and analyze data from multiple sources including medical and pharmacy benefit claims, physician-reported clinical histories and participant-reported behavioral and clinical information. Our constant objective is to achieve the highest data integrity and accuracy. Wherever possible, medical and/or pharmacy claim data is verified through interviews with program participants and communications with their physicians. This data is then integrated into DM Track^SM, the Cardium Health proprietary data management system.

• Program Activity and Demographics: Monthly and/or annual reports highlighting the number of candidates identified, the number of those candidates subsequently enrolled in a program, active participation rates, demographic information related to the age, gender, and relation of the enrolled population, and other related data.
  
  
• Clinical Metrics: Quarterly and/or annual reports depicting a variety of clinical indicators of health risk. These measures are not directly related to key disease-specific financial cost drivers, but are long-term predictors of potential future costs. For example, typical clinical metrics include exercise activity, laboratory values, tobacco use, etc. These reports are comparative in nature, displaying clinical indicators for the participant population both prior to and subsequent to enrollment in a Cardium Health disease management or health improvement program.
  
  
• Financial Outcomes: Quarterly and/or annual reports detailing comparative data for key disease-specific cost drivers. These reports compare clinical “event” rates from the baseline, which is the defined period of time prior to implementing a Cardium Health program, to the same “event” rates following program inception. Clinical “events” are the primary cause of high medical costs, disability costs and absenteeism. Together with each client, we determine the events that are most likely to impact a given population and use this as the basis for evaluating our program performance.

Future Developments
Going forward, the health improvement and disease management industry faces a fundamentally difficult challenge to develop a standard method to measure that which did not occur (i.e., the avoided hospitalization, disability, etc.). It’s a matter of proving the negative.

At Cardium Health, we are never satisfied with the status quo and are committed to working with customers in an open, transparent way to understand what the data is telling us, and what we should do about it. It is a never-ending pursuit of clinical outcome improvement for the individual participants we serve.

We are committed to on-going exploration of health informatics methodologies to continuously improve our program performance. In 2005 and beyond, we will continue to find ways to enrich our rigorous data integrity process through expanded use of medical, pharmacy, disability, and other claim or utilization data, both in our reporting activities as well as on-going clinical operations.