Along with the nation's remarkable growth in electronic health records come extraordinary opportunities to analyze “big data” and improve healthcare and lives. Those opportunities have spawned a wide range of analytical tools—each with its own potential for improving care.
But two key conditions must be present at healthcare systems before those tools are employed: a culture embracing analytics and an overall strategy for their use. Without them, the analytical tools become a distraction that healthcare can ill afford.
I see the opportunity and the challenge for the nation from my vantage point as chief information officer at Intermountain Healthcare, an organization with 22 hospitals and 185 physician clinics. Our not-for-profit integrated system embraced EHRs more than 40 years ago, so we're firmly committed to the potential and implementation of data analytics.
Yet I also hear from countless vendors with tools to offer and from peers at large and small healthcare institutions whose operating departments are each eager to acquire the analytical solution to whatever problem they face. Too often the discussion is about the latest solution for addressing a particular department's need, rather than a holistic approach to advancing care through data warehousing and analytics.
Based on our experience at Intermountain, two framing mechanisms are required to ensure that individual analytical tools are effectively used and to maximize their potential. The first is creating a culture that embraces the value of data and successful analytics across an entire organization. Second is establishing the need for data, a shared commitment to it and the importance of collective implementation.