I picked this up from Fierce Health IT newsletter:
Anvita Health commissioned a newly released HIMSS Analytics study on clinical data mining. HIMSS Analytics convened a focus group of CMOs and and CMIOs of provider and payer organizations for the report.
Payers and providers alike generally don't often employ clinical data for real-time decision-making, in part because information is in so many disparate formats, some important data elements are missing and because they believe the costs generally outweigh the benefits. "These challenges are consistent with what we've seen and heard from our payer and provider customers," Noffsinger explains. "Interoperability of data is a hurdle, but it's not insurmountable."
"A key finding for us was that both payers and providers had limited expectations for how clinical analytics could improve the quality of patient care--especially at the point of care--and lower costs through that improved quality," Richard Noffsinger, CEO of San Diego-based data analytics firm Anvita Health, says, Healthcare IT News reports. "Comprehensive real-time analytics can take these stakeholders beyond just evaluation, and provide a blueprint for action by physicians, care managers and others in the care continuum."
One of the promises of the Health Care "Reform" bill rammed through Congress is that (unfunded but mandated) improvements in and use of health care information technology will lead to improved health and lower costs. What is interesting to me from this study is the "limited expectations" that both payers and providers have for data mining for routine clinical use. Such low expectations could lead to a "feedforward" feedback on the implementation of health IT creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where low expectations for IT improving quality of care leads to underutilization which fulfills the lower expectations, etc.
Here is the link to Health Data Management which has a link to a pdf of the study.
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