The use of data analytics helped Kaiser Permanente's Southern California hospitals achieve mortality rates 26 percent lower than at other hospitals in the system, according to Chief Medical Information Officer John Mattison.
Speaking last week at the VentureBeat Data Science Summit in Silicon Valley, Calif., Mattison also said that the mortality rate at Kaiser's hospitals is dropping more quickly than the national average, the Wall Street Journal reported in its CIO Journal.
Kaiser analyzes anonymized data about patient outcomes from its integrated physician, hospital and pharmacy services, as well as medical studies to develop treatment recommendations, according to the article. Recommendations go out to doctors and hospitals as information alerts.
Mattison said doctors are becoming less resistant to the alerts, and in fact are making more requests of the informatics department, the WSJ reported. The next step is personalized medicine developed by adding genomic information to other data, with patient permission, he said.
He projected that 10 times more medical research will be conducted by analyzing data than by more conventional clinical research models, according to the article.
The power of big data is winning over healthcare executives, with 87 percent saying big data is an "important development" that will impact their business, according to a recent survey from the Society of Actuaries. Among the findings, though, 84 percent said they are challenged to find staff skilled at optimizing the data.
In North Carolina, meanwhile, a doctor at the nonprofit University of North Carolina Health Care says data analytics is becoming central to hospital operations.
For example, the hospital system developed a unique algorithm inserted into natural language processing software platform, allowing them to identify, extract and report on abnormal results from pap smears and mammography screenings, said Carlton Moore, M.D., associate professor of medicine.
For more information:
- here's the WSJ article