An eHealth Initiative (eHI) www.ehidc.org survey offers new insight into population health management analytics and reveals critical areas for improvement. The eHealth Initiative’s first ever population survey of 65 healthcare providers shows progress in the ability to collect and analyze health data, although results suggest EHRs are a missed opportunity so far. The survey shows that despite widespread adoption of EHRs, only 17 percent of survey respondents integrate population health analytics into the EHRs.
The survey by eHI was conducted September and October 2015 and included questions examining health IT infrastructure, population health management strategies and approaches, patient engagement, data use and analytics, and care management.
Results from the survey include:
- Analytics are most often shared with staff through physical reports (45%) scorecards (45%) and third party web based tools (38%)
- Quality measurement and reporting (67%) was the most reported use of analytics, followed by performance, comparisons across clinicians (43%), identification of gaps in care and preventive services (43%), and identified outliers in cost and utilization (43%) among others
- Half of survey respondents indicated that analytics are retrospective while only one-fifth of respondents (20%) utilize real-time analytics
- Key barriers associated with analytics include data integration/interoperability (54%), change management (42%), and competing health IT priorities (40%). Despite these challenges, respondents reported integrating patients in a variety of ways including data collection and target interventions
A webinar sponsored by eHI and Medicity is available online that reviews and discusses the findings.
Go to https://www.ehidc.org/articles/435-webinar-2015-population-health-survey-results for additional information on the results of the survey.