It will take time but analytics offer opportunity

BOSTON—While data often are highly granular and voluminous, poorly structured and dirty, they also offer novel, breakthrough insights into familiar challenges, said Tariq Abu-Jaber, MA MPH, vice president of medical informatics at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, speaking at Medical Informatics World.

“There are many areas of opportunity. So much of how healthcare needs to remain viable has to do with simple economics. Every time I become more efficient I lose money. Punish me for being efficient and punish me for not being efficient.”

Despite the discrepancy, there is a lot of action in predictive modeling, Abu-Jaber said. Care quality measurement is largely still based on claims-driven rules and process of care measures, but is looking towards clinical outcomes. Providers can identify and stratify members by disease cohort, risk and opportunity for intervention using data at hand. “People do what you pay them to do.”

Abu-Jaber said he hopes within his lifetime he can look at all the big payers and see not one clinical activity going on but “eight actuaries in a closet.” Provider organizations need to build up the function and built analytics into the way they practice both primary and specialty care.

For the time being, analytics is producing interesting insight but it’s “not terribly actionable. It’s not generating the outcomes we need. Most quality measurement is still based on claims.”

It’s at the edges where it’s starting to get more interesting, he said. Integration of lab values are the first step beyond claims but the question remains: What’s really going to change the game?

“Technology is going to be a big part of the answer. Current technology requires way too much work up front to make data linkable.”