The results are in for Stoneberg Consulting's annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey, and 41% of respondents think that data analytics and business intelligence will be the biggest topic in health IT for 2015. However, 51% also say they're confused about what healthcare data to collect and how much.
"Organizations feel they need to jump on the big data bandwagon, yet they approach this emerging issue reactively versus proactively," Shane Pilcher, vice president of Stoltenberg Consulting, said in a press release. "Healthcare IT leaders should instead focus on collecting smart healthcare data, monitoring what data they're saving and concentrating on the quality, quantity and validity of data needed to answer future questions for organizations."
Here are what the experts say are some of the biggest IT challenges for 2015 and strategies for how to overcome them:
1. Lack of organizational buy-in
In the Health IT Industry Outlook Survey, 34% of respondents said that a lack of buy-in across their healthcare organizations was the largest barrier to IT initiatives, including data analytics. "Ultimately data analytics is only as good as the data being analyzed," Pilcher said. "Therefore, adoption is critical among all users along the data collection pathway. Identifying early wins in decreasing cost of care and increasing overall patient outcomes is essential to developing confidence and buy-in for an organization's data analytics program." In an article in Healthcare IT Analytics, Jennifer Bresnick said that "securing executive support for a healthcare big data analytics program is critical for jumpstarting the process of building an analytics team that can convince clinicians that the efforts are worthwhile, establish the necessary infrastructure and ensure the integrity, completeness and accuracy of data that will eventually be used for analytics."
2. Interoperability
In an Analytics Magazine article, Rajib Ghosh said that interoperability will be a key focus for health IT vendors this year, so check in with your EHR provider. "Patients can move from one health system to another during a course of 12 to 18 months," Ghosh said. "Meanwhile, patients' medical records get locked in a fragmented manner inside multiple electronic systems that do not talk to each other. Releasing data from such silos is the key to deriving benefits from the use of healthcare analytics." According to Ghosh, interoperability will be at the top of the agenda for electronic health record companies in 2015. He points to the "Argonaut Project," which major EHR companies recently launched. The project's goal is to develop a first-generation API and Core Data Services specification to enable expanded information sharing for electronic health records, documents and other health information based on the FHIR specification. "The real impact of this project remains to be seen, but it is an encouraging sign," Ghosh said.
3. Increase in demand for analytics
With the shift in payment models under the Affordable Care Act, healthcare systems are under increased pressure to improve quality ratings and reduce readmissions. Ghosh said that for large or medium-sized hospitals, analytics will be their survival strategy. According to Bresnick, those that are feeling lost may wish to take their cues from providers that are already seeing success in the healthcare analytics arena. "EHRs provide an initial pool of relatively structured, patient data that can be harnessed for clinical analytics, the foundation of population health management and future efforts to engage in operational modeling," she said. "EHR data can also be leveraged into predictive insights that can help to reduce hospital readmissions, improve patient safety and raise the quality of care."
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