One of the biggest impediments to improving outcomes and squeezing waste out of our healthcare system is the different languages healthcare providers and other organizations speak. The result is sometimes duplication of effort, great breakthroughs in care that don’t get replicated widely across other systems, and chances to serve patients better which go unmet.
According to a recently released report from the Institute of Medicine, international comparisons show U.S. life expectancy ranks 49th among all nations, with rates of infant mortality higher than in many far less affluent nations. The IOM also suggests the U.S. healthcare system wastes an average of $800 billion a year. But the bigger problem, according to the report, “is that we do not know how to reverse this trend.”
Among other things, the report blames our siloed approach to collecting and analyzing data about the healthcare system’s effectiveness, which in part forms the basis for which we treat patients and pay for care. Today, patients are treated episodically by providers who only have access to a limited amount of necessary clinical information that can be gleaned during a short exam. They can’t access a full history of care, nor can they evaluate whether their treatments were effective over the long term or how their recommended care stacks up against others treating the same condition.
A big part of the reason for this is that health data is often not complete, timely or relevant. Health indicators are in different formats so they are difficult to compare. And it is precisely the free-flowing exchange of dependable data that can turn our healthcare system around.
Imagine you suffer from a chronic condition such as asthma or cardiovascular disease, and every provider that treats you is fully aware of your entire health history. Anything and everything that could have an impact on the care you will receive — your past procedures, medications you are taking — can be easily accessed by providers in a completely secured environment. And your providers are equipped with thousands of evidence-based examples of how to customize and tailor your treatments to produce the best possible outcomes.
The idea is to provide clinical decision-support at the point of care delivery, helping doctors, nurses and other providers make faster, better decisions about how to treat each individual patient. Access to this kind of insight and these kinds of tools to better understand chronic disease can do for the physician’s minds what advances in imaging like MRI have done for their vision.
But today such a scenario is the exception rather than the rule.
The Premier healthcare alliance and IBM are taking the first step to create a model that would dramatically change today’s status quo. Together, these organizations are building a transformative new infrastructure based on data that is unified, easily-accessed and from providers, payors and patients. When complete, it will enable new capabilities not possible today.
Initially, the data will be available to participants in Premier’s accountable care collaborative — 28 health systems with more than 120 hospitals and 5,000 physicians providing care for 1.5 million patients across 23 states. Eventually, the model will be extended to thousands of other healthcare sites. These are just first steps because every provider and payor should be eventually talking the same language regardless of affiliation.
Accurate and timely information may seem like a simple thing, and by itself, it is. But like other essentials of life, we can’t live without it in this age of complexity and myriad technical advances.
According to a recently released report from the Institute of Medicine, international comparisons show U.S. life expectancy ranks 49th among all nations, with rates of infant mortality higher than in many far less affluent nations. The IOM also suggests the U.S. healthcare system wastes an average of $800 billion a year. But the bigger problem, according to the report, “is that we do not know how to reverse this trend.”
Among other things, the report blames our siloed approach to collecting and analyzing data about the healthcare system’s effectiveness, which in part forms the basis for which we treat patients and pay for care. Today, patients are treated episodically by providers who only have access to a limited amount of necessary clinical information that can be gleaned during a short exam. They can’t access a full history of care, nor can they evaluate whether their treatments were effective over the long term or how their recommended care stacks up against others treating the same condition.
A big part of the reason for this is that health data is often not complete, timely or relevant. Health indicators are in different formats so they are difficult to compare. And it is precisely the free-flowing exchange of dependable data that can turn our healthcare system around.
Imagine you suffer from a chronic condition such as asthma or cardiovascular disease, and every provider that treats you is fully aware of your entire health history. Anything and everything that could have an impact on the care you will receive — your past procedures, medications you are taking — can be easily accessed by providers in a completely secured environment. And your providers are equipped with thousands of evidence-based examples of how to customize and tailor your treatments to produce the best possible outcomes.
The idea is to provide clinical decision-support at the point of care delivery, helping doctors, nurses and other providers make faster, better decisions about how to treat each individual patient. Access to this kind of insight and these kinds of tools to better understand chronic disease can do for the physician’s minds what advances in imaging like MRI have done for their vision.
But today such a scenario is the exception rather than the rule.
The Premier healthcare alliance and IBM are taking the first step to create a model that would dramatically change today’s status quo. Together, these organizations are building a transformative new infrastructure based on data that is unified, easily-accessed and from providers, payors and patients. When complete, it will enable new capabilities not possible today.
Initially, the data will be available to participants in Premier’s accountable care collaborative — 28 health systems with more than 120 hospitals and 5,000 physicians providing care for 1.5 million patients across 23 states. Eventually, the model will be extended to thousands of other healthcare sites. These are just first steps because every provider and payor should be eventually talking the same language regardless of affiliation.
Accurate and timely information may seem like a simple thing, and by itself, it is. But like other essentials of life, we can’t live without it in this age of complexity and myriad technical advances.