Thoughts from Laitek’s Dr. Fred Behlen:
The current wave of mergers and acquisitions continues apace, presenting growing provider organizations with challenges to secure and consolidate patient data from acquired facilities and practices. Enterprise systems are being expanded to scales previously unseen. Consolidating patient data from different systems and institutions into these huge systems demands data cleanup and reconciliation, but once done, the opportunities are vast for mining this data to inform process improvement and population health programs.
Accordingly, Dr. DJ Patil from the White House Science and Technology Policy briefed CEOs of HIMSS corporate members, affirming support for the Precision Medicine Initiative, stressing the importance of Data Science, and the need to train data scientists, in healthcare applications.
Health Information Exchange seems to be showing signs of sustainability in a few instances, a welcome change from past efforts that did not survive the end of their public funding. However, HIEs now face competition from the enterprise systems of big regional provider organizations, which reduce the need for cross-enterprise exchange. It will be interesting to see how this sorts out.
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