Although a recent Frost & Sullivan report cited a trend toward real-time predictive analytics, a new CHIME survey illustrates it isn't yet widespread.
In the poll of 90 CIOs by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), 93 percent said analytics is very important to their organization, and 77 percent use software to analyze data, yet only 28 percent said their organization has what it takes to meet analytics requirements.
Among the challenges mentioned were lack of standardized data across systems, lack of a system infrastructure to support analytics, and the cost of analytic software, reports Healthcare Informatics. Seventy-three percent of respondents work at organization with more than $10 million in annual revenues.
The most important use of data, they said, is improving outcomes (30 percent), followed by clinical excellence initiatives (21 percent) and financial management (13 percent). Yet 92 percent said it's most commonly used in their organizations for financial management, followed by operation efficiency (87 percent), and hospital reporting on national quality measures (87 percent).
"So we've got a huge disconnect there," says Jennifer Covich Bordenick, CEO of eHealth Initiative told Healthcare Informatics. "It's definitely a big challenge for us."
And as for predictive analytics? Fifty-eight percent said the majority of their organization's analytics resources were directed toward retrospective analytics; only 17 percent said they were directed toward real-time decision support. In fact, a new survey by Black Book Rankings recently reported that clinical decision support tools top the wish lists of hospital IT leaders, especially those developing accountable care organizations.
In the CHIME survey, the three most commonly exchanged types of data were lab results, demographics, and discharge summaries. Fifty-four percent of the CIOs said they were part of a health information exchange.
Ad-hoc queries (88 percent) were the most common use of their analytics software, followed by data mining (66 percent), and data warehousing (57 percent). Only 24 percent mentioned predictive modeling.
Accountable care and payment reform are compelling providers into a data-focused approach to improving healthcare quality and efficiency. But many organizations are still feeling their way along and looking for advice.
FierceHealthPayer's free eBook, Payers and Providers: Using Data Analytics to Identify Fraud & Waste highlights some success stories. It explores what should payers and providers look for in a data analytics program--and highlights Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center's experience in building its own.
To learn more:
- here's the CHIME presentation
- read the Healthcare Informatics story