One of the biggest hurdles to such a goal is that data is scattered across organizations that often can't speak to each other. This locks data away in silos. Some healthcare organizations are beginning to progress with data aggregation, allowing them to create a complete view of a patient's care profile and treatment. In this article, we'll look at how they do it, specifically to improve the health and well-being of society's most vulnerable.
Identifying True Sources of Value
Built for Zero is a national campaign launched in 2015. The program gathers real-time data on people experiencing homelessness and shares it with communities. The program benefits communities that don't have the resources to collect such data. While communities can access the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's once-a-year homelessness reporting, real-time data collection isn't as efficient.
"In many ways, it is like taking housing emergencies and understanding them like health emergencies," Rosanne Haggerty, president and CEO of Community Solutions, said to Modern Healthcare. "You need an individual diagnosis; you need a coordinated response; the generalists need to be speaking with the specialists." Communities are already seeing positive results from the program. Abilene, Texas, announced that it had ended homelessness among its veteran population as of February 2019. Other communities, including Bergen County, N.J., Lancaster, Pa., and Rockford, Ill., have significantly reduced or ended chronic homelessness. California has the Whole Person Care initiative, launched by the California Department of Health Care Services in 2017. Whole Person Care is also a holistic health program that looks at patients' physical and behavioral health and social needs. One of the significant successes of the program has been the creation of new partnerships with intragovernmental and external organizations. Real-time data collection and analysis allow communities to measure the impact of their homeless prevention efforts more efficiently. A paper by SAS titled 'Using Analytics to Improve Community Health' said, "What is valued in policy is what is measured, and what is measured ends up driving individual actions, treatment plans, and interventions."
Data collected periodically (i.e., every few months or even once per year) doesn't allow for quickly updating processes or changing direction. With slow data collection, a program may have veered off course and wasted money on efforts that aren't helping a community achieve its goals.
Creating A Data Ecosystem
A data ecosystem is an environment that allows data sharing between different organizations. Think of Apple's device ecosystem. Once you own more than one Apple device, you can easily access the same information across all your devices. Unfortunately, this is not the case with most healthcare organizations, but some are starting to buck the trend. Yale-New Haven Health in New Haven, Connecticut, has implemented a cost accounting system that ultimately saved it $150 million in cost." Yale-New Haven Health sought a new, improved system to help guide clinical and finance leaders at the health system toward speaking the same language, using data to partner, and together making an impact on cost and quality," Vincent Tammaro, Yale-New Haven Health System, said to HealthcareIT News. "Yale-New Haven Health needed the ability to track specific patients and their populations across the continuum, driving quality of care and better outcomes." Yale-New Haven Health may sound like a more efficient accounting system, but it is more than that. The full implementation allows the organization to track patients across disciplines. It provides real-time patient data tracking and allows more access to clinical and financial data for coordinating and reassessing care plans.
Utilizing Insights and Turning Them into Action
A report by P&S Market Research shows that the healthcare data analytics market is expected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22%, reaching a market value of $22.7 billion by 2023. Given the massive amount of data produced by healthcare organizations, we should see several advances in analysis during that same period.
The next step for organizations collecting and analyzing data (i.e., generating insights) is to turn those insights into action. This requires knowing the goal ahead of time. Insights help guide the organization toward its end goal.
Healthcare organizations are using predictive analytics in several ways to produce insights. A survey by Health Data Management/SoureMedia Research breaks us down into five categories:
- 54% — Improving clinical decision making
- 36% — Reducing the burdens of the EHR
- 34% — Turning the EHR into a reliable risk predictor
- 26% — Monitoring health through wearables
- 24% — Augmenting medical devices and machines
Through the analysis of real-time data, healthcare organizations are able to paint a complete picture of patients.
These organizations are also to determine if their treatment programs are making progress more efficiently. As organizations trend toward breaking down data silos, patients can expect their quality of care to increase while cost decrease.