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Transforming Health Care: Better Data for Better Care

Much is being said and written about the failings of our health care system, and the extent to which health Information Technology (IT) will (or will not) be able remedy many of them. For those of us who live in the world of health IT every day, we are the focal point of a lot of national attention – and rightly so. From a cost vs. health care outcomes perspective, the U.S. health care system is fundamentally broken compared to many developed countries that spend significantly less on a per capita basis for similar outcomes.

This conclusion has often been stated, and has been a catalyst for much of the recent attempts at reform. However, we have not focused the debate on the results we seek as a society, but merely on payment methodologies and attempts at moving to nebulous concepts such as “evidence-based” or “accountable care.” The result we should be focused on is the improved delivery of care at a more reasonable share of national income.

How can health IT help? Electronic Health Record (EHR) adoption is on the rise and certainly the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) incentives are accelerating this trend. However, this is just the first step. We still see health IT systems that are arcane and proprietary and most importantly are fragmented within and across institutions. Most health care delivery organizations have hundreds of separate and disconnected technologies that do not share data internally – let alone a full-fledged health information exchange (HIE) capability at a local, state, or national level.

It is not just traditional patient records that are at issue. What about the exponential increase in types and forms of data produced across the care continuum, and how that clinical data can be used to greater effect? Evolvent is actively working projects now, in which multiple imaging technologies, genomic data, metabolomic data and clinical notes all converge to provide an enormous pool of information. This data must be sifted for patterns and nuggets which lead to better clinical decision support for each individual patient’s provider, and new discoveries for medical science. What about the amazing phenomenon of health related social networking? How can this be augmented and leveraged for better care?

As the cost of care for chronic diseases continues to increase, all the data at our disposal will be required to improve care and control costs. In Transforming Health Care: Better Data for Better Care, we advance the following principles:

• How we deliver care can be fundamentally changed, extended, supported and enriched by a host of different operating concepts that are made possible by changes in information technology
• The cost of care can be radically changed through better use and exchange of information
• The quality of care can be dramatically improved through better use and exchange of information
• Transforming health care depends in large part on how we design the delivery of care and how it is supported by better data for both consumers and providers

We believe that the potential for better use of data to transform the delivery of care is huge. It is our hope that in the pages of this book we have described this transformation in a way that adds constructively to the national conversation on healthcare.

Transforming Health Care: Better Data for Better Care can also be downloaded directly to your Kindle from Amazon and to Nook from Barnes and Noble.

It is also available in PDF, iBook and MobiReader (BlackBerry) formats.