
HIMSS events are among the best places to get a feel for the future of Health IT. The brightest minds in healthcare technology gather and share ideas, and it is always a treat to see what the most innovative thinkers are planning. Here are a few ways the general mindset of the Health IT space is changing (for the better!)
- Healthcare systems recognize the value of clinical analytics, but they're still learning how to get the most value out of it. A Health Data Management* document asserted that "51 percent of health IT leaders believed that the most significant barrier to hospital data analytics is not knowing what data to collect or how much of it."
- Clinicians themselves are growing more interested in data analytics. The clinical side is catching up with the IT ops side when it comes to interest and understanding of the sheer potential of HL7 analytics to make their jobs easier and improve patient outcomes.
- There is a difference between "Big Data" and "Good Data." Among healthcare professionals, there's a growing understanding that solutions claiming to offer big data for healthcare often just can't access the most important data, or can't analyze it in a meaningful way. The focus is shifting away from saving as much as possible, to analyzing data in real time and saving only what's needed.
- Healthcare analytics can be especially useful for moving away from the fee-for-service payment model. By tracking patient outcomes per-episode-of-care, and per-encounter, healthcare providers can create much more nuanced, fair, and justified payment models.
Real-time health data analytics are going to play a huge part in the coming transformation of the healthcare IT world. The faster you can understand what's happening, at the patient-scale, hospital-scale, and even regional, national, and global health system scale, the faster you can build systems that are less expensive and more effective at keeping people healthy.