Hospitals are rapidly moving from simple electronic health records systems (EHRs) to the much more complex task of data analytics, where the clinical data that comes from these very EHRs is then combined with financial and administrative information so that a more complete or “holistic” view of the quality and efficiency of patient care is obtained, according to a new study.
These new data analytics solutions include progressive real-time and predictive techniques, often provided by web-based systems that aggregate disparate data across diverse care settings, but there are challenges.
How do you get the information you need from a physician’s office that hasn’t yet adopted EHRs? How do you get hospital mortality rates from an organization with a system different (and possibly inoperable) with yours? But the biggest challenge of all is, what will do you do with all that data? How will you crunch and assimilate it to get a full picture of the information you need?
Hospitals are now slowly putting together the tools to collapse and use all this data, and data analytics will be the way they build out their capabilities to do this.
U.S. Hospital Health Data Analytics Market research finds that the use of advanced health data analytics in U.S. hospitals will only skyrocket over the next five years. In fact, Frost & Sullivan predicts in the press release that we will see a 37.9 percent compound annual growth rate and an increase of a staggering 400 percent over the baseline.
You can thank the growth of EHRs for helping the market to mature. Today, many hospitals are simply working at “laying the groundwork” for their EHR systems and many lack the appropriate tools and capabilities needed “to turn clinical data into insight,” the press release stated.
So the market for advanced health data analytics in U.S. hospitals is only now coming into its own, with a minimal 10 percent adoption rate as of 2011.
But as the EHR market matures, hospitals will have no choice but to upgrade their capabilities in advanced analytics. Traditional approaches to providing patient care, measuring quality, and containing costs are not workable today, to keep pace with healthcare’s many rapidly emerging challenges.
"Hospitals will increasingly invest in advanced data analytics solutions to monitor end-to-end care delivery across a variety of settings," said Frost & Sullivan connected health principal analyst Nancy Fabozzi was quoted in the press release. "Due to growing competitive pressures, hospitals need to provide comprehensive reporting on performance and quality measures to a variety of stakeholders. Advanced analytics capabilities are absolutely critical for survival–there is no way to avoid it."
We’ve been seeing how the adoption of EHRs is critical to health information exchanges, but they’re also now fueling a need for ways to accumulate and sort through all the data being collected and stored. You might say it’s the next step on the (medical) information highway.
Edited by
Rich Steeves
