For population health management to be most effective, all of the physicians involved should adopt the practice and strategies. An important step in doing this involves adopting sensible physician alignment strategies that make physicians’ work easier, not more difficult. One way to do this is to adopt population health management software and services that reduce administrative work and allow providers to focus more on care.

For example, in an organization where patient data is stored in several locations and not easily accessible, it’s challenging for physicians and staff to find and analyze that data and achieve clinical alignment. The data can also become too voluminous and complex to use effectively. Your population health management software and services should gather population health data into a single, consolidated, usable resource, allowing care teams to monitor and manage patient populations more easily and ensure quality care and quality-aligned revenue. This enables a healthcare organization to analyze and seamlessly distribute patient information across its network, no matter how many EMR systems are in use.

Communication is also essential to physician alignment – and to successful population health management – and, again, technology can help. Streamline communication between physicians and staff within your organization through effective population health management software and services. Physicians and staff ought to be able to communicate with other providers, easily – and include vital information from a patient record (even images) – via secure, immediate messaging.

Of course there are economic issues involved in physician alignment with population health management, too. But alignment is much more likely to occur when physicians are helped, rather than burdened, by population alignment tools, and when they see how satisfied their patients are with coordinated care that attends to their specific needs.