Analytics
Over the next several months you will notice significant changes happening at HIMSS Analytics, starting with our re-designed website.
When most businesses consider adding cloud provisioning to their IT strategy, they are often seeking more agility, flexibility and simplicity. And those are good reasons to use the cloud. But in healthcare, there is another, more compelling reason to add the cloud to your strategy.
With most patient data now being recorded in a shareable form, we're poised to accelerate population health IT. Now it's on to the next set of major challenges, which will be front-and-center at HIMSS15: sharing data and putting it to beneficial use.
Organizations need tools that will seamlessly combine clinical, claims, PBM and lab data so providers can identify high-risk patients, pursue corrective action before an adverse event occurs and deliver trustworthy performance reports to physicians, all in real time.
CMS has signaled a renewed focus on interoperability, a welcome development for healthcare professionals anxious to more easily exchange insightful data. But there's still the matter of how well the people involved in collaborative initiatives operate together.
The healthcare industry is naturally rich with data. It's clear that analyzing this data collectively can improve patient care and outcomes, but how to actually collect, read, integrate, understand and leverage the data remains a broken process.
Population health, Big Data, predictive analytics and all that massive computing power help to improve health. But care still has to be delivered, and it will probably still be one patient and one caregiver at a time: a population of two.
Until recently, technology-enabled efforts to improve population health relied heavily on the use of claims data alone. While there is evidence this approach has merit, there is also a new opportunity to take these efforts to the next level.
Payers' involvement in patient care, and their access to clinical data, has remained limited. They have traditionally relied on claims data to build care management applications and cost reduction programs.
Tying reimbursement to outcomes can lead to better patient recoveries, more predictable costs for all parties, higher prescription adherence rates, fewer readmissions and fewer medical errors, among other benefits.
