HIMSS 2010 – The “Tsunami of Data” is Here
While exhibiting at HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta this week, I had the chance to step away from the booth and walk the show floor. Like last year, and the year before, I could not help but be amazed with the size of the event.
Alert Life Sciences booth, one of many impressive booths at HIMSS 2010.
The number of people in attendance, the size of the conference floor(s), and the size of some of the booths make this walk somewhat surreal.
Beyond the impressions of grandeur that I left with at HIMSS 2010, I took away a few other thoughts:
1) Electronic Medical Record (eMR) systems are becoming pervasive and reaching a degree of maturity that we have been waiting years to achieve. The maturity is largely due to improvements in usability, as we now have years of clinician feedback. This feedback has allowed vendors to improve the human computer interaction experience, which is unique in the setting of a physician’s office or a hospital room.
2) The tsunami of data is upon us. eMR adoption is rapidly affecting the amount of data we have to manage and learn from. Most hospitals are planning to reach HIMSS level 7, which describes the final step of eMR adoption. Building on the first 6 levels, level 7 is characterized as being able to deliver patient care without the use of paper charts, share patient information by sending secure standardized summary record transactions to other care providers, and “use their vast database of clinical information to drive improved care delivery performance, patient safety clinical decision support, and outcomes using business intelligence solutions”.
3) Premier’s CEO Susan DeVore said it best in her “Views from the Top” presentation: our future ability to manage costs and improve quality lie in our ability to effectively use our data. But more importantly, she acknowledges the vast amount of data at our fingertips and expressed her greatest fear as an inability to leverage the data. She fears that the U.S. will became a “data dump” for good information, where we spend millions to capture the data but are unable to harness the data for improvement.
We know from the past seven years of the Medicare Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project that our healthcare data can be secured, captured, aggregated, and then socialized for peer comparisons to improve quality. We need to learn from these efforts and avoid the “data dump” that might just be the tsunami on the horizon.
Tags: Alert Life Science, healthcare business intelligence, HIMSS, HIMSS level 7, HQID, Premier
The enormity of the HIMMS event–particularly the exhibit floors–almost overwhelms at times. You make keen observation and a trenchant summary in citing using the Tsunami metaphor. Some much potential swims in that sea of data; lets keep pushing for timlely and ubiquitous information that creatss sorley needed efficiencies.
And ubiqiuty is within reach through delivery to the mobile devices always at hand–from bird’s eye view to worm’s eye view. Dazzled by the wares, it’s time for me to get to work making this technology a part of our workflow. Thanks for your summary.