Today, big data along with clinical and business intelligence is growing at such a rapid rate that it is extremely difficult to process data using present day management tools. Top Experts in the field participated in the “Capitol Hill Steering Committee on Telehealth and Healthcare Informatics” briefing on April 10th to discuss the challenges and value that big data offers to the public, to patients, and many medical and healthcare professionals.
The moderator for the event, Neal Neuberger, Executive Director for the HIMSS Foundation’s Institute for eHealth Policy, announced that HIMSS has released information describing the perfect storm surrounding big data caused by post EMR deployment, the need to reduce costs and improve the quality of care, and most importantly, the technological advances that are enabling larger volumes of structured and unstructured data to be managed and analyzed.
Keynoter Karen DeSalvo M.D, M.P.H, MSc, HHS National Coordinator for Health IT announced that ONC has just celebrated their 10th anniversary. She foresees that in the next 10 years, we will be enhancing our interoperable capabilities and not just be a society that pushes data ahead.
To meet these needs, DeSalvo reports that HHS is reviewing strategic plans and is working with other agencies to focus on interoperability. The objective is to produce an infrastructure that is robust and flexible but at the same time, able to work with new data, in terms of privacy and security issues.
According to Kevin Park, M.D, Vice President for Quality at Molina Healthcare, “Molina treats patients that are Medicaid Medicare dual eligibles but they find that there are barriers to presenting high touch care to all the patients. For example, in dealing with patient information, we find a number of addresses and telephone number inaccuracies, a patient population with very little resources and many problems, and very often since they speak other languages may not always be able to adequately communicate with the physician assigned to them. Having the right data at the right time would really help providers with patients.”
The company MedRed with William Kennedy Smith, M.D, as CEO, is using data to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes for wounded warriors with TBI. However, as he explained, “There are challenges in promptly responding to mandated TBI reporting requirements, research consortiums have problems collecting data across the enterprise, and there still is an inability to conduct trend analysis on the effectiveness of treatment.”
To find some solutions, MedRed developed the TBI Toolbox system to simplify data collection, standardize reporting, and implement clinical guidelines through the use of electronic Smart Forms. For example, at the VA Polytrauma Center where the TBI Toolkit is being used, the toolbox application is projected to eliminate the need for components offering rehabilitation services to have to collect over 19,000 paper forms per year.
“Big Data can produce sophisticated models with large amounts of data”, according to Peter Edelstein, M.D, CMO, at LexisNexis. They have found that using the right models very often results in quality improvement, increases the ability to better identify and manage patients at risk, able to identify providers delivering low value care, plus identify patients that need to be matched up with the best care available to treat specific medical issues.
Lauren Choi, J.D., Senior Director, for Federal & International Affairs, at Premier Healthcare Alliance reports that Premier is looking for changes in the healthcare landscape and wants to see a bundle payment program that would enable healthcare providers to treat a patient for an episode of care. Providers would then receive one payment to cover the cost of a patient’s hospitalization and cover all services performed.
According to Choi, “Premier was pleased to see the “Comprehensive Care Payment Innovation Act” introduced in the House.” The bill was introduced to establish the bundle payment program that would provide quality, affordable healthcare so that patient outcomes would be prioritized and the overall cost to taxpayers reduced.
Choi said, “New care models are greatly needed but much more is required for the new models to work. There is a critical need to unlock data to serve these new oncoming models of care as we need more EHRs along with innovative tools to enable interoperability of health IT and EHRs. We also need to develop consistent standards, provide the right incentives, and be consistent and flexible in demonstrating meaningful use of EHRs”.
Ryan Lehman, Director for International Business Development at British Telecomm looks at big data from an international point of view and stressed that governments around the world recognize the value in making data available. He summed up the situation by saying, “New ways are being found worldwide on how to integrate non-healthcare data sets as we appropriately begin to use many sources to find the rich and demographic data that is becoming available and will be even more available in the future.”
For more information, go to www.e-healthpolicy.org