The title of a recent webinar says all you need to know about predictive analytics in healthcare: “Within Sight Yet Out of Reach.”
The Center for Connected Medicine, jointly operated by GE Healthcare, Nokia, and UPMC, put on the webinar and partnered with HIMSS on a survey on the state of predictive analytics in healthcare.
The survey of 100 health IT leaders found that approximately 7 out of 10 hospitals and health systems say they are taking some action to formulate or execute a strategy for predictive analytics. But despite the buzz and potential, there are obstacles for health systems that want to turn their big data into actionable insights.
Although 69 percent said they are effective at using data to describe past health events, 49 percent said they are less effective at using data to predict future outcomes. They cite a lack of interoperability and a shortage of skilled workers as barriers. “They want to put all that data to work to provide insights as we deliver care, but it is not an easy task,” said Oscar Marroquin, M.D., chief clinical analytics officer at UPMC. “They are having trouble getting access to the data in useful and standardized formats and don’t have the people in place to apply machine learning techniques.”
The top five use cases cited in the survey are:
• Fostering more cost-effective care
• Reducing readmissions
• Identifying at-risk patients
• Driving proactive preventive care
• Improving chronic conditions management
UPMC’s journey into the analytics space was jump-started by an institutional commitment to building the analytics program and a recognition that it needed to be a more data-driven organization. “We were never able to consume our data to drive how we deliver care until we had a dedicated team to do analytics,” Marroquin said. “Traditionally these functions were done as a side job by team members in IT systems. We have found having a dedicated team is absolutely necessary.”
Mona Siddiqui, M.D., M.P.H., chief data officer at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, says she is focused on the interoperability aspect across 29 agencies. “We are looking at how we are using data across silos to create more business value for the department,” she said. “We don’t have that infrastructure in place yet,” which leads to one-off projects rather than tackling larger priorities. She is focusing on enterprise-level data governance and interoperability structures. “I think the promise of big data is real, but I don’t think a lot of organizations have thought through the tough work required to make it happen. Practitioners start to see it as buzzword rather than something creating real value. There is a lot of work that needs to happen before we see value coming from data.”
Noting the survey result about human resources, she added that “the talent pool is an incredible challenge. While we talk about sharing data and using it for business intelligence, we don’t resource our teams appropriately to fulfill that promise.”
She said the move to value-based care has made predictive analytics more important to health systems. “It is a data play from the ground up,” and now we are starting to see the real impact in terms of managing chronic conditions. “More organizations like UPMC are seeing this is about data and measurement and bringing in not just data they have, but resources and data they may not have had access to previously.”
Travis Frosch, senior director of analytics at GE Healthcare, said that hospitals generate petabytes of data per year, yet only 3 percent is tagged for analytical use later on. “So 97 percent goes down the drain,” he added, suggesting that organizations need to start small. “If you are an organization that does not have maturity in analytics, start with traditional business intelligence to build the trust and foundation to move toward higher level of analytics maturity,” Frosch said. “Pick projects that don’t require tons of data sources. If you get a good a return on investment you can open up the budget to further your analytics journey. But you have to have a unit in place to measure the impact.”
