The healthcare industry is making slow progress with data analytics year over year, according to the 2016 State of Population Health Analytics report, which identifies major barriers to successful population health programs.
The annual report, conducted by Buffalo Grove, Ill.-based research and consulting organization Healthcare Center of Excellence, monitors how the healthcare industry uses data analytics by compiling interviews with healthcare executives, survey responses from hospital employees and findings from recent research on health IT.
One challenge, data integration, involves bringing together data from not only clinical sources, but also operational and billing information, to compile a comprehensive patient population dataset. A second challenge speaks to lack of strong leadership, which was also identified as a top challenge in 2015. The report notes that although healthcare organizations often stress technical skills, broad business and management skills are still in demand.