Analytics

Speakers at the daylong preconference event will address the roles nurses play in public health, and documentation challenges.

From big data to prescriptive analytics, this year’s health IT show has a range of education sessions.

Columbia University College of Dental Medicine this week announced that it will establish a new Center for Precision Dental Medicine, which will make heavy use of technology to enable data-driven research, advancing understandings about the link between dental and overall health. By applying analytics to multiple data streams, including both medical and dental electronic health records, the center aims to advance education and bring oral health care into the age of precision medicine, officials say. Christian Stohler, Dean of the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine, said the new center will deploy "digital technology and information science to stretch the boundaries of dental research, relating oral care to overall health care, and putting the 'mouth back into the body.'" [Also: Call for speaking proposals: HIMSS Precision Medicine Summit] The school is planning several initiatives over the next two years to help break down some of the longstanding silos between medicine and dentistry –boosting the use of predictive analytics for better disease prevention and helping improve dentistry's standing for the transition to value-based care. "Deep data mining could pave the way for systems of care that continually assimilate new evidence showing which treatments are most effective, offering personalized diagnoses and treatment plans based on thousands of parameters," said Stohler. The College of Dental Medicine will be among the first academic dental institutions to unify dental and medical patient records in Epic electronic health records, officials say – enabling them to be shared among clinicians at Columbia, NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine. Physicians and dentists usually work independently of each other, but this integration will offer a two-way flow of information to help caregivers detect and manage interrelated chronic conditions. Dentists are often the first to notice oral conditions that can be related to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and certain cancers. Clinicians will also be able to access some patients’ genomic information – when it's voluntarily shared with the school – to help tailor personalized treatments. Columbia is also aggregating anonymized data from patient visits to help researchers study evidence-based connections between oral and overall health, procedures and outcomes, stress levels and health, among the range of topics, officials say, with the aim of fostering more real-time provider feedback and predictive analytics for precision care. The Center for Precision Dental Medicine also aims to drive improvements in education, through tools such as video cameras, mobile devices and live-streamed real-time procedure data. It will also deploy new dental tools that come equipped with RFID technology to show how procedures are performed for better assessment and faculty feedback. With an eye toward financial and operational efficiencies, it also plans to roll out several new technologies to track instrument and supply use, ensure safety precautions, address patient wait times to helping future dentists better manage costs and improve patient satisfaction. Dentistry is also moving toward value-based reimbursement, officials point out, and predictive analytics and precision-based care will toward those goals. Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

The multilingual Athlete Management Solution aggregates an array of health data types to help medical staffs deliver personalized care and identify hotspots of injury or illness.

What do attendees want? Information and insights to kick off their analytic programs or take them to the next level. Deadline to submit a proposal is Feb. 15.

Chris Mitchell, a business intelligence developer at the University of Virginia Medical Center, will explore the topic in-depth during the HIMSS18 conference in Las Vegas in March.

The increase in patient engagement efforts in recent years has caused some basic rethinking of long-held assumptions about how to foster wellness. Technology is a big must-have, of course. But what about the ownership of data? Hugo Campos never thought too much about that issue until about 10 years ago, when he was equipped with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator. "Receiving that in 2007 was the beginning of my patient advocacy," said Campos, an emeritus member of the Stanford Medicine X executive board and a self-proclaimed data liberation advocate. "My background is not in health or health IT," he said. "I worked in advertising." But Campos' frustrations with his ICD data caused him to change his career trajectory. "The standard of care these days is to monitor these devices remotely," he explained. "The manufacturer is usually tasked with the data collection by the hospital or the clinic." "Patients have no access to that stream of data, that stream of information that is constantly flowing to the manufacturer and to the clinic," he said. "I find that to be an absurd obstacle to engagement." Register Now: Patient Engagement & Experience Summit, March 5 in Las Vegas At the HIMSS18 Patient Engagement & Experience Summit, Campos, alongside his Stanford Medicine X colleague Larry Chu, MD,  professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, who runs the program, will explore the value of data liberation, and how a push toward more participatory medicine could lead to patients moving past mere engagement and toward more "autonomy" and better partnerships with their care teams. More and more patients are finding themselves part of movements that they might otherwise have never considered, said Campos. "The quantified-self movement, the e-patient movement, participatory medicine, they've all started to converge, creating these really engaged people." But for many patients, especially those with implantable devices like him, "remote monitoring is an obstacle," he said. Millions of people live with those implanted devices, but are limited in their ability to engage with their own health because "they have no access to the data." As patients are entrusted with more responsibility for their own care, limited access to their own data is "the most obvious obstacle to engagement in my view," said Campos. "If you want engagement, you have to design for autonomy," he said. "For me, autonomy is sort of the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to acknowledge that what people want isn't engagement with healthcare – it's engagement with life. That's what people want." In other words: A person living with a chronic condition "doesn't want to engage with portals, with doctors, with the healthcare system," he said. "People have different needs and different desires and different goals. It should be about allowing people to use the system in the way that works for them." That sort of autonomy and agency comes with responsibility, of course. "You have to imbue in people the sense of responsibility and the notion that they really should be driving their healthcare as much as they drive their lives," said Campos. "It's important to make people realize that the doctor can't solve all their problems, that they really need to step up. They really need to do what they think matters to them. Help themselves, educated themselves.” Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

Pittsburgh's Oncology Hematology Associates is one of just 192 physician practices selected to participate in the the value-based care program.

Intermountain Healthcare is poised to validate and launch several tests to identify genetic variants associated with hereditary cancers.

Text mining technology will help the accountable care organization close identifying at-risk patients to close gaps in care, said its chief medical officer.