Analytics tops IT priorities for CIOs

Analytics is the top priority for IT infrastructure investment, according to a survey conducted by Health Catalyst of about 70 College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) members.

Value-based care requires hospitals to use sophisticated analytics to comb through clinical and financial data to reveal actionable opportunities for improving quality and efficiency, according to the study authors. As such, more than 90 percent of respondents said analytics will be “extremely important” or “very important” to their organization within the next one to three years.

In the survey, analytics was rated by 54 percent of CIOs and healthcare executives as the top IT priority. This was followed by investment priorities for population health initiatives (42 percent); ICD-10 (30 percent); accountable care/shared risk initiatives (29 percent); and consolidation-related investments (11 percent).

In ranking healthcare trends accelerating the adoption of analytics, respondents ranked population health management at 84 percent, followed by quality improvement (79 percent) and accountable care (68 percent). Analytics also supports initiatives related to cost reduction (63 percent), finding a “single version of the truth” (59 percent), better reporting (54 percent), and research (17 percent), according to the survey.

“CHIME members serve in the front lines of a healthcare industry confronted by the most significant challenges in its history, and their focus on analytics as a key solution to those challenges is confirmation of the technology’s importance,” said Dan Burton, CEO of Health Catalyst, in a written statement. “In fact, analytics is a prerequisite for all of the major initiatives currently underway to address value-based care. Once organizations have all of their data warehoused and accessible, analytics is the core tool to help them make sense of the data and put it to work.”