Analytics

New offering on Welltok platform aimed at some of largest employers, including IBM.

Healthcare IT News and HIMSS are accepting topic and speaker proposals for the Pop Health Forum 2016, May 19-20, in Boston. While population health management is key to bending healthcare’s cost curve and improving the quality of care, achieving those goals is easier said than done. With that in mind, the Pop Health Forum’s goal is to give attendees, 250-plus healthcare providers and payers, solid information on how to improve their population health initiatives. Click here to submit a proposal and for more information. Attendees prefer case studies and are eager to learn how their peers are addressing common challenges and pain points. As such, we place a high value on proposals from payer and provider organizations that offer practical, actionable information and real-life solutions. Proposals should focus on one or more of the forum’s three key areas, the cornerstones of population health: data analytics, care coordination and patient engagement. The deadline to submit a proposal is 5 p.m., Feb. 12.

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

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.

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.

NorthShore University Health System is easing and, in certain instances, automating clinical workflows within electronic records to pinpoint high-risk patients and gaps in care using predictive modeling.