Will Digital Health Data Lead to Better Care?
Experts explain how mindshifts and new technologies can lead to smarter, accessible healthcare services.
Reports show global healthcare IT could become a $200 billion industry by 2020, but experts say these are challenging times for healthcare organizations navigating regulations and a wave of digital health data technologies.
Using technology to improve healthcare quality, safety and efficiency has been an uphill battle. Experts say there’s a need for better cooperation, interoperability and a shift from reactive to proactive use of patient data.
This shift could lead to what’s being called “automated care,” where computers analyze tremendous amounts of health and lifestyle data, then use artificial intelligence to deliver data-driven options that help doctors treat patients.
If the U.S. healthcare industry used big data to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year, according to research firms MGI and McKinsey.
But for the most part, the healthcare industry remains in an era of little data, according to Kenneth Laliberte, a products solutions manager at Meditech, which sells information systems for health care organizations.
“We have yet to really unleash the power of big data,” Laliberte says.
He said harnessing the power of big data requires healthcare organizations to move from a mindset of hindsight to foresight. The ability to collect, manage and access a wide array of patient data will help keep people well, rather than just address health needs when illness occurs.
Patient data is often fragmented, not captured in a uniform manner, and inaccessible by providers when they need it. Managing and using patient data require interoperable systems, and this is a big challenge, according to Andy Bartley, a senior solutions architect for the Health & Life Sciences Group at Intel.
He said Health Level Seven International and other standards organizations advocate for consistent protocols for sharing data between protected health devices.
“It’s not an easy issue to solve, and even with national and international standards bodies, there’s still a lot of work to do to try and solve those problems,” said Bartley.
About 80 percent of health data is unstructured, which means it is captured but not organized in a pre-defined manner, according to Laliberte. That means this important information is not categorized, making it difficult to find.
“That’s all data needed to get an accurate picture of a patient population,” said Laliberte.
Plus, other information could be considered useful, too, including lifestyle and behavior data, neighborhood conditions or even personal health tracker data.
Laliberte said categorizing data more thoroughly can help healthcare organizations and clinicians identify hot spots of high-cost patients and chronic disease.
Even without a universal healthcare data system in place, organizations still need to use all the patient information available, according to Mark Wager, president of Heritage Medical Systems, which manages patient care through physician groups and independent practices.
“The fact that we don’t have perfect information is not new,” said Wager. “Everybody is concerned that [big data] is not perfect so you wait and tweak, but the patient cannot wait. You need to take the pieces of the information you can get and consolidate it.”
Wagner said without well-categorized data running on inter-operable systems, organizations collate data from multiple information platforms, including hard copies and hand-written forms — all of which can be inefficient and compromise health outcomes.
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