Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/197073
Executive Briefing: Big Data W H AT I F T H E R I G H T I N F O R M AT I O N F Population health management Currently, healthcare resembles a large block of Swiss cheese, with continuity in some places and large holes in others. Patients go from primary care physicians to specialists to the hospital — and those providers may or may not be communicating in real time, if at all. To manage the health of these individuals, you need to connect all providers, including the patient's pharmacy and their local urgent care center. Only then can you begin to meaningfully discuss applications to broader patient populations. Big data's core underpinnings are efficiency and low cost, allowing you to connect with and assimilate quickly all clinical and claims data from primary and secondary care providers, large hospital institutions, payer organizations and others. As an example, let's consider a group of patients with diabetes. There are a number of established best practices to ensure compliance with evidence-based standards for this condition. The only way to discover who's compliant and who's not is to look at every possible source of patient data for the presence or absence of these practices, such as the A1C test. Ideally, you would see that the test was performed and receive results within the patient's medical record. If you don't see it there, it may be linked to the test results from a national laboratory or within that patient's claims data. Regardless of where you find the information, the key is to have an information source that consistently provides clinical and claims data, in real time, at the point of care, within the clinician's workflow. Having this information available avoids duplication of services and allows you to move on to the next step in the treatment plan. Done consistently, this type of widespread action across patient populations can improve quality of care while also driving down costs. 45 exchange, we're building better bridges between these islands and facilitating more efficient and effective communication. Every piece of data counts. We may never get to 100 percent of every patient's clinical and claims information, but even getting to 50, 60 or 70 percent is a vast improvement over where we were even a decade ago. Aggregation One reality check: Clinicians are on data overload. Healthcare IT professionals want to give clinicians the tools they need to be successful rather than larger amounts of data "as is." Gathering the data is only step one. It's about collecting, de-duplicating, parsing and sorting the data, then building systems that can aggregate and extrapolate the most valuable, targeted information needed to provide quality patient care. "Big data is scalable, streaming data in many forms (structured, unstructured, text, multimedia, etc.) that can be accessed for real-time decisionmaking." This is the ideal, of course — to be able to do this, and do it widely. The question is, how long it will take. In the past, providers were like islands, and those islands didn't talk to each other. (And if they did, they talked via facsimile — I know, scary.) With the continued adoption of EHRs and more widespread health information These aggregated systems are not likely to be driven by physician offices or even hospital systems. Most likely, they will come from another entity. And that's why you see the push from the Office of the National Coordinator and other entities to get health information exchanges in place. HIEs amass vast amounts of data across a number of provider organizations. With the data aggregated, there's an opportunity to develop algorithms for analyzing the data and providing value-added information to providers — whether they are managing an individual patient at the point of care or analyzing specific patient populations to identify outliers in need of intervention. Decisions you make today on EHRs, HIEs and strategic organizational alignments will have a significant impact on how well positioned you are to take advantage of what lies ahead. Ultimately, what big data will represent is the ability to efficiently agW T H a common I TA gregate data, filter it, synthesize it, translate Iit intoT H E D I G vo- L E N V cabulary and route it to where it needs to go to accomplish the goals Sandlot more providers do now to of improved health and lower costs. TheSolutions understands exactly w how to deliver the more they will secure a solid foundation for data aggregation,it. Our fourth-generation thrive in the era of big data, making a real and measurable impact analytics combines clinical knowledge a on patient outcomes and the sustainability of their organizations. n intelligence to help you manage risk and Through our "digital envelope," you rece based care alerts at the point of care, w high-level visibility to monitor quality m and population trends. And, of course, th our care manager platform or yours. All Find us, and we'll make sure the right inf Call 800-370-1393 or visit sandlotsolut Sandlot Solutions understands the information caregivers need and how to deliver it. Our fourth-generation health information exchange, plus analytics combines clinical and claims data with business intelligence to help you improve care, manage risk and demonstrate value. Through Sandlot's "digital envelope", you receive compliance and evidenced-based care alerts at the point of care, within your workflow. It provides high-level visibility to monitor quality measurements, patient outcomes and population trends. Additionally, the digital envelope works with our care manager platform or yours; all of this through the cloud. For more information, go to www. sandlotsolutions.com .