Starting with the right kind of data is critical to the success of an accountable care organization (ACO), Naveen Srabu, product management director for Liaison Healthcare Technologies, told an audience at the AHIMA Convention in Atlanta.
As reported by GovernmentHealthIT, Naveen outlined three building blocks he said are necessary to develop the analytics component of an ACO from the ground up:
- Start with practice-level information, including standardized lab results and detailed patient information, if available.
- Develop a repository of "longitudinal" patient records including claims data, information from electronic health records and practice management systems, and data from related forms.
- Harmonize information coming in from different practices, all of which have different interfaces, and determine what analytics you want to run to produce meaningful results.
One of the lessons of the Pioneer ACOs is that data is the key to making everything work, healthcare executives said during a recent panel discussion.
"One of our biggest successes has using been predictive analytics to define the high-risk patients and then get our arms around them," said Greg Sheff, executive vice president of clinical services at Seton Healthcare Family in Austin, Texas.
Actually utilizing all that data can be just as challenging for ACOs as collecting it, a new report from the IBM Institute for Business Value suggests. Companies trying to leverage big data and data analytics report limited data-analytics expertise among top executives and challenges in recruiting technical talent skilled in data analytics.
For more information:
- here's the GovernmentHealthIT article