Analytics

ClearData, IBM, PureStorage and others are positioning themselves for an emerging an environment where providers rely on a mix of public and private secure clouds for their data.

The healthcare venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase has hired insurance executive Dana Gelb Safran as head of measurement, a data-driven technology position, according to CNBC. Safran is the chief performance measurement and improvement officer and senior vice president of Enterprise Analytics, at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. She joins the Boston-based group headed by Dr. Atul Gawande. WHY IT MATTERS In her role at BCBS Massachusetts, Safran was responsible for leading efforts to use data, measurement, incentives, and reporting to improve the quality, outcomes, and affordability of care, according to biography information from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Webinar: Women in Blockchain: Making a Difference in Healthcare through Distributed Ledger Technology Safran’s experience improving quality and outcomes while lowering the cost of care through IT is exactly how the industry views Amazon’s new venture and its potential to tackle healthcare’s greatest challenges. Data and analytics will loom large, as will offering the 1-plus million employees of the three companies a personalized approach to healthcare benefits. THE TREND Not much has been released about the new venture, which the big three formed earlier this year. It still has no official name. Gawande was named CEO in June. Safran’s background in health insurance, however, aligns with the innovations expected of Gawande, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon, author and New Yorker staff writer who, in the November 12 issue, sympathized with physicians struggling to balance EHR technology with work schedules and patient care. DANA SAFRAN: THERE'S MORE TO KNOW Safran was appointed to serve on MedPAC in 2017 in a term through April 2020. She is also an associate professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. She serves on a number of state and national advisory bodies related to healthcare quality and affordability, including the National Quality Forum Consensus Standards Approval Committee and the CMS Technical Expert Panel on the Quality Rating System. Twitter: @SusanJMorse Email the writer: susan.morse@himssmedia.com

Innovation Factory’s Alaa Chalabi talks using wearables to detect sleep disorders and snoring habits at WISH in Doha, Qatar last week.

There is a small market for software that combines physical and mental health data hospitals can use to better understand threats before an incident occurs.

The three-day program at Harvard Medical School aims to educate healthcare leaders about best practices for using data analytics to drive business objectives.

John Daniels, VP of HIMSS Analytics, says there is more to digitizing an organization than installing EMR functions, and discusses other adoption and maturity models including artificial intelligence, continuity of care and infrastructure.

AI, machine learning, cognitive computing, neural networks? Supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised? Object recognition, natural language processing? What does it all mean?

From basic information governance to advanced precision medicine, health systems large and small describe their strategies for putting data to work.

The Ministry of Health (MoH) of New Zealand has chosen MidCentral and Southern District Health Boards (DHBs) as pilot sites for implementing digital maturity assessments. The pilots will include three HIMSS Analytics maturity assessments: the electronic medical record adoption model (EMRAM), outpatient-EMRAM (O-EMRAM) and the continuity of care maturity model (CCMM). MoH group manager digital strategy and investment Darren Douglass says the assessments cover digital maturity across multiple care settings, which will create useful information to inform where DHBs focus in terms of digital investment.  HIMSS EMRAM scores hospitals internationally on their adoption and use of electronic medical records on a scale from 0–7, and O-EMRAM is used to evaluate services provided outside of a hospital or acute care environment. CCMM focuses on the capabilities needed in order to “seamlessly coordinate patient care across a continuum of care sites and providers,” the HIMSS website says. Douglass says the two DHBs were chosen as pilot sites because they have both recently developed digital health strategies and have strong linkages within their districts across hospitals, primary care and community services. The timing of pilot programmes to implement HIMSS digital maturity assessments has yet to be confirmed. The success of the pilot programmes will inform whether the assessments are rolled out nationally. All DHBs have previously completed the EMRAM hospital inpatient maturity assessment. According to MoH’s eHealth website section on Digital Hospitals, HIMSS Analytics provided a report on the findings within New Zealand in June 2016. Evidence from implementations overseas has shown a strong correlation in improvement in productivity and quality as hospitals move up the EMRAM model to Stage 7. A version of this article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.  

From decision support optimization to EHR performance improvement, the Boston health system puts its data to work in new and interesting ways.