| | August 20168UTLOOK Healthcare Tech OpinionIn myProviding healthcare creates an enormous amount of data. Think of all the details on all the forms mandated by regulation and company policy and all the available comparative data from diagnosis to medication to demographics, all the specifics about patient history, and so on. Yet with such abundant data, we have yet to realize its potential. Rather, the data we've amassed so aggressively amounts to the IT equivalent of a tower of Babel. So many different languages are spoken at the same time that virtually everything is lost in translation. As a result, we're nowhere near answering the fundamental question: What care will result in the best outcomes for the lowest cost?So now what? For IT departments, delivering value depends on delivering actionable information. If we stick to touting our performance on system availability, abandoned call rates, and self-service password reset success, we are a utility limited to tactical support.Traditional IT metrics have almost no meaning. Our IT spend, for instance, may be 2 percent of revenue, or 4 percent, or 6 percent. And even though we need those numbers, what do they tell us about quality?How about measuring our value by how well we support decision-making? We should be asking "How good is IT at delivering the information we need to improve our care and our operations and achieve our strategic objectives?" We should score how well IT helps adapt to population health management, assuming risk, reducing operating expenses and, of course, how IT contributes to improving patient outcomes. IT should be more widely recognized as a potential cornerstone of patient care, particularly for care in the home. And, this should be initiated by, and demanded of, IT departments.In general, leading health systems and payors have become more sophisticated than most providers of post-acute care, and are more practiced in leveraging data to Why Our Data Should Take On a Greater Voice in Patient Care?By Martin Howard, CIO, AmedisysMartin Howard
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