Analytics

The health system takes a practical approach, building analytics dashboards for nurses to enable proactive quality improvement.

Health orgs are using AI to enhance decision making and drive greater value for patients and providers, AWS says.

Definitive CEO Jason Krantz said the deal will strengthen its market intelligence platform.

While accountable care may be shifting some spending priorities, too few health systems of any type are thinking enough about how future changes will decide their IT needs, says Deloitte.

The health system's Physician Services Group worked with IT leadership to help aggregate EHR prescribing data and make it available to its providers.

At HIMSS19, John Rekart, chief of quality management and informatics at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will show how homegrown analytics enabled a 25 percent post-implementation reduction in sentinel events.

Ambulance Victoria will soon deploy a predictive analytics platform that gives its paramedics access to real-time information, enhancing and accelerating its decision making as the need for emergency services grows. The platform, supported by Microsoft Azure, aims to support machine learning, data mining, AI and contextual models for richer data insights that the agency can use to better its services. The platform also has capabilities to store the data for use when needed and provides a single pane of glass for Ambulance Victoria staff to access data from multiple applications and across its different environments. Ambulance Victoria Chief Information Officer Mark Gardiner told HITNA that the proposed predictive analytics program will add to its current business intelligence capabilities by analysing its current data to better allocate resources. “Predictive analytics will enable Ambulance Victoria to use a single platform to combine data currently used… with other data sets such as weather and traffic patterns to better predict where resources are best allocated,” Gardiner said. This helps staff with their decision-making, by identifying which routes and areas they should avoid as a result of weather or traffic, for example, so as to get to patients in a quicker time and deliver on the services required. Ambulance Victoria currently uses some business intelligence capabilities using a Microsoft Dynamics-based system named Ambulance Victoria Reference Data Set (AVRDS) to manage its data. But according to the pre-hospital emergency care and ambulance services provider, the data is “manually handled and carries significant lag” particularly around quality and resource or supply data, doing “little or nothing to enable decision support”. “Ambulance Victoria currently lacks capabilities and tools to monitor and improve performance as well as support divisions in real-time, making the existing technology platforms one of the key challenges in delivering better patient outcomes,” the agency recently said. [Read more: Ambulance Victoria app fast-tracks urgent care to people suffering cardiac arrests | EMRs and the Royal Flying Doctor Service – how the iconic institution approaches innovation] “As a modern ambulance service, Ambulance Victoria focuses on continual improvement. This includes looking at any new or emerging technologies that are available to enhance what we already do with a focus on delivering the right patient care, at the right time, at the right place,” Gardiner said. “By harnessing all available data into a single platform, Ambulance Victoria will increase its ability to meet the growing demand for emergency services and deliver better patient outcomes. “Once the tender is complete Ambulance Victoria expects to begin rolling out the platform over five years.” Ambulance Australia has picked Microsoft Azure as the platform in delivering predictive analytics and is now on the lookout for a primary platform supplier to execute and support the platform securely, in addition to managing the data. It is also looking to appoint a panel of suppliers that Ambulance Australia said “will help deliver solutions and expedite the delivery of new capabilities” like data dashboards and data ingestion.

Big Blue's collaboration the nation's largest Parkinson's foundation aims to apply AI to a vast dataset with the aim of learning more about how the disease grows.

A national study into the risks of CT scans in children that was delayed by three years waiting for Commonwealth approval to access data has supported findings that Australian health and medical researchers face a myriad of problems around data accessibility for research. Another example, a University of Melbourne researcher who spent $60,000 of her research budget to access 6000 Victorian births, deaths and marriages certificates, also supported the claims of the Flying Blind 2: Volume 2 – Australian Researchers and Digital Health report. The study found that better access for researchers to health data could save the country $3 billion and improve the health of all Australians over the next 15 years. Flying Blind is a collaboration between the newly established Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), the Capital Markets CRC and Research Australia. The report indicated that in spite of the abundance of digital data that Australia holds, health and medical researchers often spend several months and even years assembling data required for their research. This has impacted advances in both health and medical science, as well as the development of the health and medical technology and pharmaceutical sectors. According to the report, these obstacles very often result in long delays where research funding almost runs out, forcing many researchers to abandon linked data studies and make do with small data sets or seek overseas data banks to address their research questions. “We have digital health data that can save lives. We have technologies that can transform healthcare, saving lives and dollars. Yet researchers’ hands are tied,” the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre research scientist and mentor and lead author of the report Uma Srinivasan said. Delays are caused by a range of factors, the report found. One of the factors is the fragmentation of health services delivery across primary, secondary, hospital and allied healthcare setting. Further barriers include: a health and medical research ecosystem comprised of complex funding and ethics approval processes, as well as ad hoc policies and data governance strategies that differ across state and federal data custodians. [Read more: Tech development, regulation, investment and implementation key to digital health | What are the barriers to widespread telehealth adoption?] The report stated that these “processes and policies lack consistency” and are “often not transparent to researchers, causing inordinate delays in getting necessary approvals and access to health and medical research data”. “The problem is that accessing anonymised data is difficult and expensive because of the fragmentation of health data, the multiple Commonwealth and State Acts applying to it and the need to often deal with large numbers of data custodians and ethics committee,” the report stated.     “[Australia can] do much more,” Digital Health CRC CEO David Jonas said. “Australia is an advanced nation when it comes to capturing data, but we are far behind our peers when it comes to providing access to that data.” The report also proposed a series of recommendations to enhance medical research in Australia: A harmonised process of data governance that provides a path from collection to researchers, and ensures privacy and confidentiality are maintained. Appointing organisations to act as data-holding organisations for both structured and unstructured data Creating Accredited Release Agencies to build data collections suitable for research  Privacy, security and confidentiality by design Publicly accessible protocols for all Australians to see how health data is used and how it is making a difference A single national data rich access point for researchers, as well as healthcare and health technology sectors. Flying Blind is a series of three reports dedicated to uncovering the acute levels of data fragmentation existing at all levels of Australia’s health landscape. The first in the series focused on the consumer health journey while the third will provide a view of data from the perspective of funders, policy and regulatory agencies.

The company will be highlighting its new Edison platform, AI algorithms built into medical devices as well as diagnostics and therapeutics for precision medicine.