ARMONK, NY – The only way that hospitals and other healthcare providers are going to rein in costs is if they learn from past practices and fine-tune the processes.
That’s the thinking of IBM, which made a big splash at HIMSS08 this past February with the launch of a new portfolio of healthcare solutions designed around business analytics.
“I believe that health analytics is going to be the most significant megatrend that we’re going to be seeing in healthcare IT since electronic medical records,” said Ivo Nelson, IBM’s vice president for Global Healthcare Providers. “It’s going to create a whole new category within healthcare IT … and we’re at the front end of it.”
IBM officials believe hospitals and other healthcare providers are starting to get a handle on their IT needs, but they might not know what to do with all that data they’re accumulating. With that in mind, the company unveiled Enterprise Health Analytics, a complete set of services, infrastructure and tools designed to provide healthcare providers with the means necessary to transform data into actionable results.
Nelson says the healthcare IT field now is heavily populated with transactional software vendors, and that the prevalence of those IT tools has created an “explosion of data.” What isn’t readily available, he said, is a means for collecting that data from various silos and disparate systems, collating and analyzing that data, and using it to improve healthcare delivery, whether it be clinical, financial or administrative.
“We’re at a stage right now where hospitals can’t even produce simple quality reports,” he said. And with the introduction of quality-based pay-for-performance programs, he added, “they’re not nearly as responsive as what they’re going to need to be.”
That’s a fact not lost on healthcare IT executives. According to a recent Gartner study of 1,500 CIOs worldwide, business intelligence applications were rated the top priority over the next three years, beating out such hot topics as systems security, updating legacy technology, CRM and ERP.
IBM’s new direction was emphasized repeatedly at HIMSS08, during which IBM executives pointed out that their recent acquisition of Toronto-based Cognos gives them good positioning in the analytics market.
“There has been static data in EMRs for many years and it has continued to be dependent on paper,” said Dan Pelino, general manager for IBM Global Healthcare and Life Sciences, during a separate press session. “Healthcare leaders have to take the next step beyond, moving into the analytics field. The market is mature enough to be able to extract and aggregate data. Early innovators will be rewarded.”
Nelson says IBM will market this new suite of services from an enterprise level, creating a 12-week program that allows customers to work their way into developing data, using tools and putting governance in place to manage data.
“Healthcare is the most complex of all industries,” he said. “It’s not that the databases are that much bigger, but the number and relationships of data elements is complex.”