Deloitte Consulting and Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare are teaming up in a five-year collaboration to help the healthcare industry harness big data and analytics to reduce costs and improve patient outcomes, the pair announced this week. The collaboration will draw on Deloitte's professional services and informatics capabilities, and Intermountain's experience in capturing and using data to provide high-quality care at lower costs.
While Intermountain has 40 years' worth of digitally collected data from its 22 hospitals and 185 clinics that can be used in longitudinal studies and effectiveness research, it and Deloitte also expect to incorporate data from other leading health systems to help discover what works, and to bring that into practice more quickly.
Deloitte's life sciences and healthcare practice includes services to 3,700 professionals and nine of the 10 largest healthcare systems. Deloitte also will provide data-visualization software to help identify patterns in the data.
"We hope to accelerate the development of what the Institute of Medicine refers to as a 'learning healthcare system,'" Deloitte chief innovation officer Andrew Vaz said in a statement.
The announcement is the latest in a series of collaborations between healthcare systems and private partners with regard to data use. UnitedHealth and Mayo Clinic agreed to combine their data for more than 110 million patients to help research ways to improve care while lowering costs.
Mayo Clinic also is partnering with a diagnostics company, Silicon Valley Biosystems (SV Bio), to further personalized medicine through genomics, a plan similar to Children's Hospital Boston's for-profit venture with genome-sequencing giant Life Technologies.
Two organizations that have turned to evidenced-based care and data sharing--Memorial Hermann Healthcare System in Houston and Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif.--recently were honored for their improvements in patient safety.
Memorial Hermann established an accountability structure to implement process improvements among employees and bedside staff. Kaiser Permanente, meanwhile, helped develop clinical best practices based on implant registries that integrate data across medical centers in nine states and analyze statistics around patient outcomes.
To learn more:
- here's the announcement