Health Dialog: The Frontier of Population Health

Health Dialog is a care management, employee wellness, and decision support provider. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rite Aid Corporation and is based in the United States and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Health Dialog has the vision to become the nation's leading total population health management services provider.

“Health plans, providers, and employers will turn to us first for help in maximizing the health of their populations in the most cost-effective way, and the individuals we engage with will place a high value on the support we provide because it empowers them to improve their health and well-being,” explains Danielle Barrera, the Chief Operating Officer of Health Dialog. Keeping this vision in mind, the company works on its mission to empower people to improve their health while reducing unnecessary healthcare costs.

For health plans, effective member engagement has a direct impact on every metric of success: lower costs, better clinical outcomes, member loyalty, and member retention. Health Dialog helps clients achieve all of those goals by delivering personalized member engagement and multi-channel health coaching and education that can be tailored to the unique needs of Medicare, Medicaid, or commercial populations. Together, the company helps drive healthier member behaviors to improve clinical and financial outcomes.

Personalized Health Management

Health Dialog’s philosophy is simple: it provides truly personalized population health management support services that address the unique needs of every individual. Health Dialog’s consumer engagement programs, multi-channel health coaching, and shared decision-making tools are designed to deliver the right intervention to the right patient at the right time. “At the core of our philosophy is our Care Pathways framework, which enables a deeper stratification of the population and a better understanding of every individual’s clinical needs,” adds Barrera.

This leads to the question of what is Care Pathways framework. Traditional disease management programs stratify populations based on high-level risk indicators and place a greater emphasis on managing the conditions of the top 20% of the population that drives 80% of the costs. Wellness programs, in turn, are used to support and engage patients classified as low-risk and low-cost, but the long-term benefits of these programs are often difficult to track. 

Health Dialog’s Care Pathways framework is different. It digs deeper to stratify populations based on clinically-relevant disease trajectories that track an individual’s or population’s progression along a specific condition pathway. This framework guides the development of the company’s analytics, which leverages more than 10 years of member data. Care Pathways analytics enables Health Dialog to accurately place individuals at every stage of a condition—including well, at-risk, pre-diagnostic, onset, early progressive, and late progressive, critical, sentinel, and recovery stages. Every stage of the Care Pathway represents a key point of a condition that can benefit from specific engagement, coaching, and education strategies.

‘Total Population Healthcare is in our DNA’

As the healthcare industry moves from a volume-based model to a value-based model, providers need to implement total population health management programs and adopt new ways to help patients with chronic conditions stay healthy and avoid costly hospital visits.

Health Dialog is the right partner for this effort. Whether you're an ACO, a patient-centered medical home, or another at-risk provider, Health Dialog will help you improve population health and reduce costs with its personalized patient engagement programs, multi-channel health coaching, and award-winning shared decision-making tools.

At Health Dialog, the analytical and clinical experts have built a framework that enables it to stratify populations into targeted segments, with an emphasis on truly understanding each patient’s clinical needs, future risks, likely behaviors, and receptivity to change. “We then further stratify these segments, or cohorts, based on a patient’s conditions, behavior patterns, age, socioeconomic factors, geographic location, language, culture, purchasing decisions, access to technology, and more,” explains Barrera.

By developing this deep understanding of the population, Health Dialog is better able to assess a patient’s health status and more accurately predict future risks and outcomes. This insight guides the development of patient engagement strategies and tools that enable clients to deliver results in value-based or performance-based contracts.

A Platform for All

Health Dialog is an equal opportunity employer. Employment selection and related decisions are made without regard to sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, age, disability, religion, national origin, color or other category protected by applicable law. Health Dialog encourages applicants with disabilities to voluntarily self-identify as part of the application process. As an equal opportunity employer, Health Dialog does not discriminate based on disability and information provided is kept strictly confidential.

The company is an active part of the ‘Disability Inclusion Starts With You’ program by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). It encourages applicants and employees with disabilities to voluntarily self-identify by explaining the key role that self-identification plays in measuring contractors’ progress toward achieving equal employment opportunity for people with disabilities.

Meet the Star of Health Dialog

Danielle Barrera is the Chief Operating Officer at Health Dialog and RediClinic. In this role, she leads the product development, analytics innovation, marketing strategy, and operations functions of both organizations. Danielle has more than 20 years of experience in healthcare and related industries, both in the medical provider and managed care payer sectors. Prior to joining Health Dialog and RediClinic, she served as the Director of Occupational Medicine for Memorial Hermann Healthcare System and Health Network Providers (HNP), the largest healthcare system in Southeast Texas and the largest Independent Physician Association (IPA) in Texas. At Memorial Hermann, Barrera managed all occupational related hospital and employer worksite clinic operations, as well as client and provider development, and the insurance product lines, resulting in multi-million dollar revenue generation for the organization. Barrera holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.

“Our innovative roots and our expert coaching empower people to take charge of their wellness and live longer healthier lives.”