One of the shocks to me at HIMSS 2018 was that there wasn’t nearly as much discussion around healthcare analytics as I thought there would be. I thought for sure we’d see an explosion of proven analytics that healthcare organizations could start to take advantage of. Maybe I just missed it, but I certainly didn’t see anything all that new.
It’s too bad because that’s one of the huge opportunities I see for healthcare. I was looking through some old notes from conferences and saw a note where I wrote: “What you do with the data is the competitive differentiator, not the data.”
Certainly, you need access to the data to be successful, but there are a lot of organizations out there which have access to health data and they’re not making any sort of dent. Many of the now defunct HIEs had access to the data, but they didn’t know what to do with all that data. I’m still on the search for more analytics which are useful.
One other idea I found in my notes was the concept of a self-learning analytic. Related to this was the discussion we had about black box analytics in a recent #HITsm Twitter chat. I don’t think they have to be the same, but I do think that the key to successful healthcare analytics is going to require some component of self-learning.
The concept is simple. The analytic should look at its past recommendations and then based on the results of past recommendations, the analytic should adjust future recommendations. Notice that I still call it recommendations which I think is still the right approach for most analytics. This approach to constantly learning and evolving analytics is why it’s so hard to regulate healthcare analytics. It’s hard to regulate moving targets and a self-learning analytic needs to be moving to be most effective.
This is possibly why we haven’t seen an explosion of healthcare analytics. It’s hard to get them right and to prove their effectiveness. Plus, they need to continually evolve and improve. That’s the opposite of what researchers want to hear.
This is why the future of healthcare analytics is going to require deep collaboration between healthcare analytics vendors and provider organizations. It’s not a black box that you can buy and implement. At least not yet.
What’s been your experience with healthcare analytics? Where are you seeing success? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Agreed that the collaboration needs to be between clinicians and vendors. Too many of the decisions are made in the C wing of organizations without adequate input from clinicians. Usually what I have seen is initial cost savings presented to the C wing that make business sense, for a product that never meets the expectations of it end users.