Health IT Summit: Providers need forward-thinking IT strategies

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. –“We are at the precipice of change. Organizations face life or death decisions by their choice of IT strategies,” Scott Lundstrom, group vice president at IDC Health Insights, told attendees at the Institute of Health Technology Transformation’s Boston Health IT Summit on May 8.

With ever-increasing consolidation and heightened financial pressures, those entities that succeed are the ones forward thinking in their IT approach, Lundstrom said. “We do a bad job of managing technologies in the health IT space. We need to rev up the technology side.”

Lundstrom said those providers that focus on the third platform of IT technologies, which he described as mobile, social, big data and cloud, are the ones that will make gains. He said investments in second platform technologies such as LAN, internet/client server and PCs are stagnating, while “all growth is in the third platform.”

“We need to move our flag, change our bets,” he said.

Lundstrom recommended that providers use third parties to hold their data in clouds. He said outside companies are willing to sign business agreements and take on liability in regard to privacy and security, adding that, ultimately, providers save money from outsourcing their data storage.

Cloud computing is on the rise, he said, citing a statistic that 50 percent of U.S. companies will move 50 percent of all their IT assets in third-party data centers by 2016.

“Cloud players are engaging in a data arms race to accumulate the strongest portfolio of public and ‘for fee’ datasets,” he said.

In the area of big data/analytics, he said providers with the best data will win, especially those that embrace comparative-effectiveness research. In the past, he said it took 10 years before clinical research results fully reached physicians. But, with research now integrated into big data systems at the point of care, “it creates really dramatic acceleration.”

Big data means real value in healthcare. He said technologies allow for real-time data on patient outcomes, social media and medication compliance, and will drive best practices to prevent medical errors. Unstructured medical record data, social and psychological data also will inform care.

In the meantime, Lundstrom said as accountable care organizations lay their foundations, analytics will play a central role in their strategies. He said top technology investments for 2013 will include analytics, risk identification and predictive modeling, which will help the healthcare organizations with consumer segmentation.

Successful providers also must embrace social technologies and mobility, especially as patients embrace mobile in place of PCs as their main form of communication and data access, Lundstrom said. Further, he said forward-thinking providers will experiment with online care to reduce readmissions and manage chronic disease patients to “create new revenue streams for their practice.”

Lundstrom predicts that CIOs and CFOs will transform the IT financial model and lead the effort to shift computing platforms to more capital efficient models like cloud computing or outsourcing.

“Executives will be directly involved in 80 percent of new IT investments,” he said.