Analytics

While the development of accurate predictive analytics has the potential to head off debilitating and costly conditions among patients, one veteran of the burgeoning field says it’s important not to rush in without the proper planning. "The first thing to understand is you need to have the right technical infrastructure components in place and it has to address what you are looking to do with it," said David M. Seo, MD, associate vice president of IT for clinical applications and chief medical informatics officer for the University of Miami Health System. "But there is a lot people don't think about – like data curation and quality," he said. "Is the data you have good enough to even do predictive analytics? Because if it isn't, that prediction may actually harm you more than it helps. You may go off on a wrong tangent." Seo and Chitra Raghu, senior program manager and innovations officer for Lockheed Martin Health and Life Sciences, presented will be presenting the U of M system's experience in preparing its predictive analytics platform in "Predictive Analytics Drives Population Health Management" at HIMSS16 on Tuesday. Beyond the quality of the data itself, Seo said other factors, including the presence or absence of skilled data scientists; a thorough understanding of how to localize predictive models from other health systems; and how to best integrate existing investments in electronic health records with analytics technology, must be carefully considered before pulling the trigger on new platforms. "There are so many technologies," said Raghu. "You have to find what is the right one that will help hospitals achieve what they are trying to achieve, at the lowest cost." Seo added even health networks with a dozen or more hospitals are not likely to already have the necessary skill sets in-house. And even a platform that offers great analytics capabilities, for instance, may not be popular with either clinicians or financial executives if the caregivers need to toggle back and forth between an EHR and an analytics platform. "If I'm looking at a patient in front of me right now, I don't have time to go somewhere else, and when I've gone somewhere else I've already lost the advantage of this massive investment in my EHR,” Seo said. “So it has to be part of your system's ecosystem." The session "Predictive Analytics Drives Population Health Management" is slated for March 1 from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in, Palazzo I at the Sands Expo Convention Center.

Iatric Systems intends to unwrap a set of analytics services to help healthcare providers meet federal mandates at HIMSS16. The vendor specializing in patient privacy, analytics, EHR optimization and interoperability, said that it will debut a new offering dubbed Analytics On-Demand at the conference, which begins late next month. “Analytics On-Demand was built to help provider organizations move to value-based care,” said Frank Fortner, president of Iatric Systems. “It comes with prebuilt modules. Initially, these modules will be heavily weighted toward things like quality measure management, meaningful use and the value-based model – all coming together under one program.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews Readmission management, population health management – providers are struggling to get good tools around these kinds of things, Fortner said. “For us, this is just a starting point,” he said. “It’s about helping providers transition to value-based care, but not stopping there. Executives will be able to create their own modules in a DIY dashboard style and address many of the hot-button issues in healthcare.” The rules in healthcare change every year and, as such, provider organizations suddenly find they need to report on new or different measures; as a result, analytics is a challenge, he added. [Also: Making analytics work for quality improvement?] “Our goal is to provide a quick, one-stop shop that can handle all this reporting for healthcare executives, as well as bring professional services around these areas,” he said. While the 26-year-old Iatric Systems will be debuting Analytics On-Demand at HIMSS16, it also will focus its efforts at the annual conference and exhibition on the various core components of its business including interoperability, patient privacy and electronic health records optimization. Iatric Systems will be in booth 7730. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

SCIO Health Analytics has acquired Westlake Village, California-based Clear Vision Information Systems, the companies announced Thursday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Clear Vision provides software-as-a-service analytics focused on risk adjustment and quality metric strategies for health plans and providers. SCIO Health Analytics CEO Siva Namasivayam said combining Clear Vision's analytics offerings and outreach services with SCIO's predictive and prescriptive analytics tools will help clients better manage the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care. Namasivayam points to the government’s goal of tying 30 percent of payments to value-based mechanisms such as accountable care organizations by the end of 2016, and 50 percent by the end of 2018, and said the combined offering will help ease the shift. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] The acquisition of Clear Vision – whose clients include government and commercial health plans/payers, providers, medical groups and ACOs – adds to SCIO’s offerings in the ever-growing analytics market. "The two sets of technologies dovetail nicely to deliver a well-rounded picture of the changes organizations need to make to achieve their goals,” said Tom Peterson, founder, president and CEO of Clear Vision, in statement Peterson founded Clear Vision with Pam Klugman in 2006. Both will join SCIO Health Analytics in executive roles. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Editor's note: This is the second segment in Roy Smythe’s two-part interview with Dr. George Day on the nature and application of science-based innovation to advance the new model of healthcare. A world class thought leader speaking at HX360’s Executive Program during HIMSS16, Dr. George Day is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor Emeritus and co-Director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the leading global experts on the science of innovation. Dr. Day has studied many aspects of change and competitive advantage in businesses, including such topics as understanding how to leverage emerging technology, the importance of utilizing interdisciplinary partners to anticipate market needs, and most recently what differentiates non-healthcare corporate innovation leaders from “laggards” in his most recent book, “Innovation Prowess”. This interview has to parts. Part 1 focused on organizational structure around innovation. Part 2 below centers on innovation execution. (This interview was edited for clarity, readability or length.) Question [Smythe]: Healthcare organizations have a large number of areas where improvement could be beneficial – financial, technological, clinical and others. How do organizations that have an abundance of choice in this regard focus on the vital few initiatives that will create the biggest outside impact? Answer [Dr. Day]: I’ve never met any organization that didn’t have more opportunities than they can ever possibly pursue. The worst case is where you try to do a lot of different things, but do none of them well - hence the role of discipline in narrowing the set down. In any organization, having a clear strategic approach to looking at the possibilities ahead of you is critical. Everyone in your organization has to be aligned around the qualitative and financial objectives that will be accomplished (e.g. cost reduction, improving the patient experience). What is critical to the execution and discipline part is the (1) resource allocation and (2) the choice among innovation alternatives. Counter-intuitively it works better if you start in a divergent way and ask – what are all the things we could do? Start looking aggressively for ideas – not just the ones that come across your desk - but go out and canvas for ideas within the organization as well as peer hospitals, and spend time studying the patient experience. The idea is you diverge first and then converge –you are at risk of missing the best ideas if you don’t ask. This is something the Chief Innovation Officer or Chief Strategy Officer could orchestrate. Once you have your portfolio of possibilities, the discipline part comes in. Narrow down to the ones that are aligned with your strategy, technically feasible, and can deliver results in a realistic timeframe. Some techniques you can use to screen your portfolio include innovation tournaments, discovery-driven planning, and patient experience mapping. Question: Could you please explain further the importance of real options reasoning and how it could apply to efforts to generalize innovation in healthcare? Answer: The idea around real-options reasoning is akin to the experience in buying a house. You are not sure you want to buy that house, but you don’t want to lose it. So you put down $10,000 to get another month to consider it while continuing to look further. If at the end of the month, you don’t like the house, all you have lost is the $10,000. If you do like the house, you can exercise the option and apply the $10,000 to the purchase price. Buying a real option gives you the opportunity to learn but doesn’t commit you to big action. Think of it as a stepping-stone or a way to step into a major change. Some examples of this in the healthcare space would be doing a pilot or initial implementation, or taking a small stake in a start-up company – both actions do not require big commitments. Question: In an industry that is shifting towards a focus on measuring outcomes, some of which could take months or even years to show clinical benefit, how can an organization measure innovation progress and effectiveness? Should there be more focus initially on input, engagement and process measures? Answer: About six years ago, I did a project with McKinsey where we looked at all the innovation metrics. We found an upwards of 45 metrics that could be grouped into 3 buckets: Inputs – e.g. # of ideas (expanding before contracting), # of investment dollars, employee time, # of employees involved in innovation, balance of the portfolio Throughputs or intermediate steps – e.g. # of quality ideas, time to move idea from concept to prototype, satisfaction with prototype, # of pilots completed Outputs – e.g. how many reached the market, % of revenue derived from new solutions Outputs turn out to be of little to no value in situations where you are fixing a system that is broken. For example, failure rates on innovation are found to be really high, but you have no diagnostic insight into what to change. The challenge is to push back into the innovation funnel towards the intermediate stages and focus on inputs and throughputs. By tracking inputs you are able to uncover issues such as – are inputs being protected? Throughputs and intermediate stages of innovation is often where you see problems propping up. Here you can uncover issues such as: significant approval delays and people moving in and out of teams. Monitoring these earlier process problems can help tell you what to fix when issues arise. Discover more of Dr. Day’s critical healthcare innovation insights and applications at HX360’s Executive Program during HIMSS16, February 29 – March 3, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada.      

Electronic data interchange and in-house transcription are just two of the five emerging health IT applications that will surge in 2016, according to a new report by HIMSS Analytics.

As executive director of the Staten Island Performing Provider System, Joseph Conte is overseeing part of one of the more ambitious and creative healthcare initiatives in New York: the new Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program.

Roy Smythe, MD, interviewed Dr. George Day to drill down into the science of innovation and give readers some flavor of the need to understand innovation at this level.

HIMSS revealed that HX360 is adding two speakers with national experience in healthcare issues who are not afraid of taking controversial positions.

Healthcare IT News and HIMSS are accepting speaking proposals for the Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum, which will be presented June 14-15 in San Francisco.

Just a month after receiving an investment from healthcare giant HCA, Nashville-based cognitive Digital Reasoning has acquired Shareable, a fellow Music City tech company known for its clinical documentation platform.