Dive Brief:
- Massachusetts General Hospital has turned its queriable patient interface dossier (QPID) into a clinical intelligence platform that allows for surgical predictive analytics. The hospital, which is a quaternary referral center, uses the system to determine a patient's risk score.
- When a patient comes in with a potential high-cost or high-risk procedure, QPID crunches patient data to determine a patient's percent of surgical risk. It provides the surgeon with a red, yellow or green risk indicator based upon its calculations.
- According to hospital spokespeople, the American College of Surgery has considered using this as a standard practice nationwide. But the system does have limitations: It doesn’t have information from paper charts or data from patients' files from other physicians.
Dive Insight:
The healthcare industry is one of the last major ones to use analytics as a regular, valuable tool. Nascent uses include population management and chronic disease management, but for many providers the sheer cost and labor it takes to adopt such technology is enough to keep them out of the market.
Unfortunately, due to interoperability challenges, using analytics to determine a patient's potential surgical risk is a next-generation use of analytics. As long as paper-based records are still in use and until patient information from all providers is linked, this kind of application of data works best as a tool to support clinical decision making.