Marc HollandProprietary HIEs Growing FasterIn the health information exchange (HIE) space, Holland says the study finds that policy initiatives by the federal government are showing evidence of spurring activity, and therefore, positively impacting quality of care. Holland notes that proprietary HIEs among health systems and their affiliated practices are growing at a faster pace than community exchanges between multiple hospitals.Top Barriers to Using Data Despite the fact that there has been a growth of five percent among hospitals in the past two years, according to data from the HIMSS Analytics Database, only 30 percent of U.S. hospitals presently use a clinical data warehouse/mining solution. Respondents to the study mentioned multiple barriers to using clinical data. The top barriers noted were:• Getting data into the system: Relevant clinical data runs the gamut from handwritten clinician's notes on paper to codes on medical claims, and manually entering data is resource-intensive.• Data mapping: Once data is in the system, it must be data-mapped for extraction to be made usable for analytics. Several respondents noted that this is a complex task, particularly when data is not captured in discrete data elements.• Incomplete data: Respondents expressed concern that some data elements required for analysis might be missing as a result of an incomplete record, resulting in an inaccurate analysis.• Multiple databases: Data required for a thorough analysis may be housed in multiple databases making the connection between databases a challenge.• Translating the data into actionable intelligence: Turning clinical data into relevant data that a clinician can act upon and integrating that information into the workflow is a challenge particularly for health care provider organizations.Holland says that bridging the incompleteness of the data was one of the most important challenges providers need to overcome. “If you have holes in that data, then the kind of analysis that you may need to do—in order to understand those differences in patterns in the data, and the contribution those differences between patients have on outcome, cost or quality—will be compromised if you don’t have all those underlying data to discern those differences.”“Providers are coming to the realization that there’s this rich source of information that can be derived from these investments they’ve made and that they are looking for increasing ways to harness that,” Holland concludes. “I’m very encouraged by it.”
