Healthcare is a data-driven industry. Healthcare providers collect information from patients to analyze and arrive at a diagnosis, prognosis or treatment. Health systems look at data on a larger scale to identify areas for clinical improvement, or areas in which their hospitals excel. On an even larger scale, healthcare providers aggregate data from a wider geographic or cultural spread to determine overarching trends.
Data is a good thing. But given the constant influx and changing requirements stemming from healthcare reform, the question begs, do we have too much of it?
Too much of a good thing?
Most industry experts agree: there is not too much data in healthcare, nor is it even possible to have too much data. The industry simply doesn't know what to do with all of it.
"We are certainly witnessing a tectonic shift in data, no question about it. People and organizations are collecting and storing more and more data than they ever dreamed of," says Kevin Greene, vice president of business development for Logi Analytics, a business intelligence software company.
The issue here is that the data is not being translated from its primary form into meaningful information.
"Data is just crude oil," says Anil Jain, MD, CMO of Explorys, a healthcare big data analytics company spun out of the Cleveland Clinic. "You need people and companies to be refiners, so they convert that [data] into something that's useful. I'm not a fan of saying there's too much data, but we need to let the refiners catch up so we have people actually making use of it."
Without tools and processes to mine the data and convert it into useful information, providers simply don't know what to do with the data they have, Mr. Greene adds.
A new frontier
While many talk about the need for tools and expertise to mine the data, the movement toward this next step doesn't seem to be moving quickly enough. Where is the disconnect between theory and application?
Simply put, "it's a new field," Dr. Jain says. "The skill set and expertise and background providers need to operate in a big data environment, not everyone is at that page yet."
In healthcare, at least. John Hansel, vice president of healthcare provider solutions for MedeAnalytics, an analytical solution software company, agrees with Dr. Jain that the expertise to fully digest this data is missing from healthcare. However, the minds that can do it are there, they are just found in other industries.
"Think about all the expertise that exists in the 20-something-year-old data analysts that work at Facebook and Google and all the high tech companies today. [There are] huge amounts of intelligence and expertise in mining data," Mr. Hansel says. "You get those smart people and sophisticated tools and apply them to the rich data in healthcare and convince those people they can do it for a higher purpose instead of selling ads and tracking consumer behavior."
As an example, Mr. Hansel mentions the case of Jeff Hammerbacher, the first data scientist at Facebook who ended up leaving the social media kingpin and eventually landed at Mount Sinai in New York to apply those same principles to achieve better value in healthcare.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks," Mr. Hammerbacher said in a Businessweek report.
Data in healthcare reform
With the focus on quality data in the center of healthcare reform, the industry needs those analytic minds to stem the tide the data requirement frenzy caused. The switch from pay-per-service to pay-per-performance requires hospitals to not only accurately report their data, but there is more incentive than ever to continually improve their metrics, lest they face reimbursement cuts.
"I don't know a healthcare professional that doesn't wake up everyday believing in the oath they took to care for patients, but now it's an economic imperative that they start using this data to drive better patient outcomes. The ones that do are being rewarded — in particular, by the government — and those that don't are being punished," Mr. Greene says.
While the new reporting measurements are aimed toward standardizing and improving care, the nature of them, ironically, does the exact opposite.
"If you were to ask me a slightly different question, instead of is there too much data, are there too many measures that the government is tracking, the answer is yes," Mr. Hansel says, mentioning the "alphabet soup" of different quality measures.
When CMS, the National Quality Forum, the National Committee for Quality Assurance and the Physician Quality Reporting System all require different metrics presented in different formats, an inconsistent and inefficient version of healthcare emerges, he says.
"It's hard to focus your business when there are hundreds of overlapping and conflicting quality measures for 10 agencies," Mr. Hansel says. "Standardization of that and consensus in the industry that we're going to manage healthcare systems toward 20 metrics would be a great improvement."
More data?
Even amongst the data explosion and increasing data requirements, the data flow will only increase. Providers and researchers require continuous data, as it serves as the foundation for discovery and advancement, even if it seems extraneous.
"What we might consider to be superfluous or redundant data today may be considered incredibly important tomorrow," Dr. Jain says. "It would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion we're collecting data that's not useful."
Mr. Hansel even suggests that perhaps the industry is collecting the wrong kind of data.
"What's missing in those quality measures are the real outcomes measures in terms of quality of life," Mr. Hansel says. "Did the patient return to work? You come to the more important things that you think would be indicative of quality but aren't part of the quality metric landscape."
While it may be more difficult to access, this data is not unattainable and, arguably, truly gets to the core of healthcare and emphasizes the overarching goal of the industry: improving the lives of people.
"There's a huge opportunity to enhance the data available within the hospital or within the healthcare system with external patient demographic and psychographic information," Mr. Hansel says. "It's not that there's too much data in healthcare, there's not enough. There's a whole wealth of data outside the hospital walls they're not even using yet."
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