One of the big themes being talked about at the Healthcare IT Transformation Assembly this week and particularly during my Care Performance Transformation roundtable with Midas+ has been around healthcare analytics and the solutions that will help a hospital utilize their data for population health, value based reimbursement, and improved care. This has made for an interesting discussion for me after having attended SAP Teched last week where SAP talked about the need for the right healthcare data solution that can scale to the needs of healthcare.
At both of these events it became very clear that the future of healthcare is being built on the back of healthcare data. The quantity and quality of healthcare data is expanding rapidly. There’s a lot of healthcare data being generated within the 4 walls of every healthcare organization. There’s a lot of healthcare data being generated outside of the healthcare setting. Plus, we’re just barely getting started with all of the data that’s needed for all the -omics (Genomics and Proteomics). Getting a handle on this data and ensuring the data can be trusted is of paramount concern for healthcare leaders.
What seems to be playing out is healthcare organizations are having to choose to invest in both point solutions and larger healthcare analytics solutions. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be one catch all solution that will solve all of a healthcare organization’s data transformation needs. None of the current solutions scale across all types of data and solve all of the current healthcare requirements. Although, some could eventually grow into that role.
In today’s discussion in particular, a number of hospital CIOs made clear that they had no choice but to have a variety of care transformation and healthcare analytics solutions. There wasn’t one integrated solution they could purchase and be done. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of PM, HIS, LIS, and EHR purchasing. Most purchased them separately because there wasn’t one integrated solution. However, over time people moved to buying one integrated system across PM, EHR, LIS, etc as the software become integrated and mature. Will we see the same thing happen with our healthcare analytics solutions?
While we’ve seen the move to more integrated healthcare IT solutions, we’re also seeing a move away from that now as well. Every EHR vendor is working on APIs to allow third party companies to integrate new solutions with the EHR. There’s a realization that it would be nice if the EHR could do everything in one nicely integrated solution, but it won’t. It’s a cycle that we see in software. I imagine we’ll see that same cycle with healthcare analytics solutions as well.