Dr. Sean Frederick, Chief Medical Officer, Allscripts Population Health

The United States population stands at 323 million and has a net gain of one person every 12 seconds. And, as insurance coverage increases, more people than ever before are seeking health care services. Estimates show that 20 million people have gained health coverage because of the Affordable Care Act within the last few years, placing new demands on our healthcare system.

Unfortunately, the number of healthcare professionals is not increasing at the same rate as demand for services. It means we, as physicians, have to be more effective in how we manage our patients.

Analytics is a powerful tool for clinicians to use to navigate the rising tide of patients. We can customize analytics to provider, organization, geography, diagnosis or any number of attributes for a community of patients. Because, when we can key in on patients who are most at risk or who need the most help, we can align our priorities and resources to optimize care for them.

Christine Kern, a writer for Insight Enterprises

The speed and scale of the current challenges and demands experienced by today’s healthcare organizations are unprecedented. The creation of ever-increasing amounts of data, coupled with the application of new advances in treatment, diagnosis and analytics, means that healthcare is on the brink of some major developments. The promise of analytics lies in its ability to transform healthcare into a truly data-driven culture.

While privacy and security risks are challenges to using big data, the potential positives outweigh the negatives. Healthcare data is considered the most complex and disconnected set of any industry, but successfully exploiting these opportunities provides huge returns not only financially, but also for the quality of care.

“The trend to see and use information as an asset is still in the ‘early adoption’ phase, making doing so a competitive differentiator for leading organizations. But even where information leaders have embraced this idea, there’s an array of challenges to transform the idea of value into a reality that benefits the organization. Information has economic value that organizations can ‘turn into money’ in two ways: selling, bartering or licensing it; and by using it to reduce costs or increase revenue. Yet most information and business leaders lack the experience and tools to monetize information,” asserts the Gartner report, “Seven Steps to Monetizing Your Information Assets,” published October 15, 2015.

Colin Roberts, Vice President, Product Strategy, West Corporation

Raffi Terzian, M.D., MPH, Senior Vice President of Clinical Operations, Senior Medical Director, West’s Health Advocate Solutions

There is no denying that technology is transforming the healthcare experience. However, better patient outcomes are still reliant on strong patient engagement. Further, people have various needs and preferences when it comes to how they want to approach and manage their health. A one-size-fits-all engagement strategy is no longer effective to motivate people to take action to improve their health.

Additionally, reaching the maximum number of patients through consistent patient communication across the continuum of care is key to closing gaps in care. Yet, many healthcare organizations do not have the tools and processes in place to align patient member communication with clinical workflows or care plans. As a result, engagement is often disjointed, reactive and inefficient. For example, periodic outreach phone calls are too easily missed.

However, organizations can meet the varied needs of patients and improve outreach by harnessing the power of technology like automated phone calls, texts, emails and online portals, and blending it with personalized communication. Both technology and live support resources offer their own mix of benefits and costs for organizations, but when implemented appropriately, they can be very successful together. Finding the right balance can benefit organizations, driving patient engagement and optimizing healthcare outcomes.

Joe Warbington, Director Market Development for Healthcare, Qlik

Emergency departments around the world are under tremendous pressure to reduce patient waiting times and drive clinical effectiveness in all areas. The ED in most hospitals is a fast paced, high pressure environment where no two days are the same and where an increasing demand has led to significant focus on quality and performance. Given this backdrop, data and analytics may not seem like an obvious solution, but the evidence of the impact these programs are having is undeniable.

At the North East Georgia Medical Center, Dr. Mohac Davè, the ED Medical Director has been working with Qlik in their ED for over 2 years, specifically targeting performance, patient experience and patient safety. The ED manages 115,000 patients per year and one of the early findings showed that contrary to popular belief, arrival patterns are actually extremely predictable. “We now know with some certainty that Mondays, especially afternoons and evening, are going to be the highest volume day.” Dr. Davè goes on to say that, “Qlik has allowed us to take this knowledge and provide staffing to demand.”

Joe Warbington, Director Market Development for Healthcare, Qlik

There is no doubt the healthcare industry continues to transform and evolve at a staggering pace. Between the mergers and acquisitions, to the ever-changing regulations, to patient care, one has to wonder how health systems these days keep track of it all and remain profitable, while delivering care patients and society expect to receive. So how do successful health systems do it? How do successful health systems change the internal culture to reflect the various demands patients, stakeholders, and clinicians put on them while also ensuring safety and profitability? The answer, quite simply, is put is to empower decision makers to make data-driven decisions at the point of care rather than days, weeks, or even months down the road.

In order to do this, one must work to change the internal cultural within a health system, to really rally the troops so to speak, and implement a solution that enables stakeholders to create an enterprise-wide, sustainable and progressive environment for analytics. Yes, analytics. By applying visual analytics solutions to various departments throughout the health system, one is able to see the wide-range of benefits, including the delivery of enhanced patient care, inventory levels being more accurate, as well as the ability to reduce costs and waste.

Warren Strauss, Battelle

Amy Andres, Ohio Hospital Association

Performance benchmarking provides hospitals with invaluable information to drive quality improvement initiatives: how they compare with similar hospitals across different quality metrics, which mitigation strategies have proven to be most successful among their peers, and how these trends are evolving over time. To get the most benefit from healthcare quality improvement initiatives, hospitals need comparative information that is timely, complete and actionable. State hospital associations may be in the best position to help their members design and implement an analytics system that meets all of these needs.

Power in numbers: Lessons from Ohio
Since 2013, the Ohio Hospital Association (OHA) and Battelle have been working together to create a shared analytical platform for Ohio hospitals. The result is Battelle WayFinder QI Dashboard, a cloud-based quality improvement analytics tool that allows hospitals to organize, display and analyze Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and other quality indicators, and benchmark performance among hospital types.

David Hall-Tipping, Solutions Manager, Logi Analytics

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to streamline operations and run more efficiently, with the ultimate goal of improving patient care while reducing costs. One way to do this is to ensure every worker has easy access to data analytics from health records systems and information portals – and that they actually use that information to make decisions. However, the latter part has proven to be trickier than expected for many organizations.

The analytics adoption problem is something that affects organizations across all industries, and it is only getting compounded as organizations require their employees to be more data-driven. In Logi’s 2015 State of Self-Service Analytics Report we found the analytics adoption rate of business users was 22 percent, even though users in most organizations have plenty of analytics tools on hand.

After taking a step back and looking at the issue, many organizations have quickly realized that the reason many analytics tools result in poor user adoption is the over-generalization of those tools.

Analytics is not one-size-fits-all: In any healthcare setting, different users will need to utilize data in vastly different ways. At a hospital, nurses on the floor need to quickly access high-level, comprehensive patient data on the go. On the other hand, hospital administrators may prefer to dive deep into detailed efficiencies dashboards on their desktops.

If healthcare organizations want to ensure user adoption of analytics tools, it’s essential that the capabilities be tailored to individual users’ roles and skills.

SAP SE  today announced SAP Health Engagement, a new solution to connect patients directly to physicians and health program managers. The solution gives health providers, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies the ability to build custom applications to help patients track their health through goal setting, as well as pull personalized assessments for chronic diseases and conditions. By directly linking patients to healthcare professionals with real-time data and high-speed analytics, the technology will let physicians and health program managers make early interventions to improve health outcomes and will help lower healthcare-related costs later in life.

“SAP is advancing technology that improves people’s lives and places them at the center of care,” said Werner Eberhardt, general manager of personalized medicine, SAP. “The SAP Health Engagement solution enables healthcare companies to develop applications that help patients manage chronic conditions, offer personalized home care and engage patients in clinical trials. When they have a 24×7 connection to their doctors, patients can more effectively partner with healthcare professionals on managing their health.”

Joe Guerriero, Senior Vice President of MDGuidelines, Reed Group

(Editor’s Note: This article is part one of a three part series. Part two is published here. Part three is published here.)

How do you deliver on the promise of improved outcomes while still tightly managing costs? That’s a question that more than 700 ACOs face every day.[1] It’s also the same dilemma payers and employers have wrestled with for years, which is why it’s critical to learn from their approach. By leveraging both evidence-based guidelines and physiological duration tables, many employers have successfully returned individuals to health quickly and safely, all without wasting resources.

One key challenge, however, is that many physicians don’t have tools at the point of care to help them determine the safest, quickest path or the length of time it may take for a patient to heal and return to their normal lifestyle. As a result, there are tremendous variations in how providers manage specific conditions, injuries and illnesses. And these variations can have a negative impact on both patient outcomes and the bottom line. 

To address this challenge, ACOs can provide intelligent clinical decision support tools to providers at the point of care. With a combination of evidence-based clinical guidelines and physiological duration tables, physicians can better coordinate care around the final goal of returning patients to health, all while taking into account patients’ unique attributes and circumstances. Treatment planning can include personalization through predictive modeling based on factors like age, gender, geographic location, and underlying co-morbid conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease.

Jim Utterback, Principal, Witt/Kieffer

When millions of consumers buy Fitbits and download wellness tracking apps for their smartphones, it is clear there is very broad and deep interest in using computers to improve health. And if you are following Apple’s and others’ investments in medical technologies, you know that firms are betting big on this future.

Fitbits, along with more sophisticated and digitally connected insulin pumps, implantable cardio defibrillators, home health monitoring devices, and fetal monitors are just a few indicators signaling the significance of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare practice.

These things sense and collect data from their immediate surroundings – including from patients themselves – and share that data with other things. They trigger specified actions for specific circumstances. All this activity happens automatically in the IoT, and the prospective benefits are considerable.

Among the applications cited by John Glazer in HH&N Magazine are sensors to measure and track blood pressure remotely. Estimates have shown a remarkable 64 percent drop in readmissions for patients whose blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels were monitored in this way. Without a doubt, this and other smart technologies are changing the landscape for healthcare organizations.