CIOs Want Analytics Above All Else

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Analytics in healthcare are becoming increasingly important, and solutions providers will find opportunity in helping executives work past the obstacles that are keeping them from addressing data issues.

Health Catalyst recently surveyed senior IT executives from some of the nation’s largest health systems and found that their top investment priority around IT infrastructure is analytics. This is no doubt driven by the new emphasis on quality improvement and cost reduction required by governmental healthcare reform.

All of the executives surveyed were members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). Respondents were asked to give their opinions on a high-level view of the different priorities around IT investment that hospitals and their leaders face in a time where value is increasingly important in the industry. The Affordable Care Act uses the term “value-based care” and, along with private industry, provides incentives for providers who are able to improve patient health.

CIO Opinion Of Value-Based Care

Most of the experts surveyed agree that hospitals will need to increase their use of sophisticated analytics to properly sift through the huge amounts of clinical and financial data that are being accumulated, if they want to find any actionable opportunities around quality improvement and efficiency. Respondents ranked IT investment priorities as follows:

• analytics (54 percent)
• population health initiatives (42 percent)
• ICD-10 (30 percent)
• accountable care/shared risk initiatives (29 percent)
• consolidation-related investments (11 percent)

According to Dan Burton, CEO of Health Catalyst, “CHIME members serve in the front lines of a healthcare industry confronted by the most significant challenges in its history, and their focus on analytics as a key solution to those challenges is confirmation of the technology's importance. In fact, analytics is a prerequisite for all of the major initiatives currently under way to address value-based care. Once organizations have all of their data warehoused and accessible, analytics is the core tool to help them make sense of the data and put it to work.”

Obstacles

Respondents were also asked to name the biggest obstacles in adopting analytics. The number one impediment was a lack of expertise in the area, meaning healthcare organizations are in need of the knowledge and experience that solutions providers bring with them.

They also indicated that a lack of resources and other priorities taking precedence over analytical needs were a major problem. Solutions providers who are able to provide executives with clean, effective solutions to basic issues are bound to be able to cut a path to the emerging executive concern of analytics.