If healthcare is to rise to the challenge of providing better care while holding the line on costs, stakeholders across the entire industry must collaborate around digesting data and serving patients.
That was the message of Susan DeVore, president and CEO of the healthcare performance-improvement alliance Premier, in a keynote session last week at HIMSS19 in Orlando.
U.S. healthcare must become more “consumer-centered and provider led, with data flowing seamlessly, analyzed effectively and leveraged so as to guide decision-making at the point of care,” DeVore said.
She then laid out five interconnected challenges healthcare must pull together to tackle.
Here’s the gist of each imperative.
1. Avoid data overload and embrace actionable data. People have been tossing around the term Big Data for years in healthcare, DeVore noted. And now that it’s actually arrived, “it’s overwhelming,” she said. There’s an embarrassment of data riches in everything from costs to outcomes, genomics to wearables and supplies to billing. “Those things are all important,” DeVore said, “but each one needs to be understood, analyzed and normalized”—both on its own terms and as it relates to other data sources.
2. Translate actionable data into clinic-ready information. “Clinicians need a total performance architecture that can serve up data no matter where the patient shows up,” DeVore said.
3. Support the professionals who treat the patients. Citing several high-profile merger announcements that rocked healthcare in 2018—CVS-Aetna, Cigna-Express Scripts, Rite Aid-Alberstons grocery stores—DeVore predicted the rise of “sophisticated, risk-based” entities that “bypass traditional third-party payers altogether.” This is just one development that would better enable clinicians to focus their full attention on the patient, she suggested
4. Don’t just keep developing new apps—use the ones you already have. “We have killer apps, but they haven’t been effectively deployed,” DeVore said. Catching up with existing innovations may prove key to “unlocking return on investment in the many millions of dollars we’ve already spent on EHRs.”
5. Make app-derived data “liquid and accessible” to improve both predictive analytics and clinical decision support. “Data is the key that unlocks the transformative power of apps,” DeVore said. “This is the most urgent challenge to address in the world of health IT.”
“Providers have to be ready to get what they’ve been asking for” in their plans for Big Data, DeVore said. They now must develop coordinated and structured investment plans for new technology, put data governance in place, build data strategies and “hold individual clinicians accountable to the outcomes we require.”
“We have to do this,” she said. “It’s the force that will give rise to the future we’re all working toward.”