Productivity improvements have helped many industries — with the exception of healthcare. Between 1999 and 2014, productivity in the healthcare sector grew by only 8%, while other industries achieved much higher efficiency gains of 18%. Although productivity comparisons across industries tend to be inaccurate, they show healthcare lags behind other industries in terms of productivity and potential.
To improve productivity in healthcare, two things must happen. First, data must be understood as a strategic asset. Data must be leveraged through intelligent and comprehensive workflow solutions, as well as the use of artificial intelligence (AI)—to automate and put patients at the center of the value chain Picture.
Second, to be able to talk about a value chain, the areas of competence must be interconnected. The connection should be as seamless, open and secure as possible. The aim is to ensure that all relevant data is available when needed by patients, healthcare professionals and medical researchers.
A modern enterprise imaging software solution must prioritize optimizing results, improving diagnostics, and enhancing collaboration.
Healthcare today: voids, blockages, cellars
The costs and consequences of today’s healthcare data fragmentation are profound: inefficiencies and unnecessary duplication, treatment errors, and missed opportunities for basic research . Recent medical literature is filled with examples of missed opportunities — and patients at risk because of a lack of data sharing.
More than four million Medicare patients are discharged to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) each year. Most of them are elderly patients with complex conditions and potentially dangerous transitions. According to a 2019 study published in American Journal of Managed Care, one of the main reasons for patient discounts during this transition is the lack of sharing of health data — including missing, delayed, or unwieldy information — between the hospital and the SNF. “Poor transitional care practices between hospital and SNF compromise quality and safety results for this population,” the researchers noted.
Even in hospitals, data sharing is still a big problem. One year 2019 American Hospital Association Research published in the journal Health care interactive functions are analyzed as part of Promote interoperability program administered by the American Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and accepted by qualified U.S. hospitals. The study found that of 2,781 non-federal, acute care hospitals, only 16.7% had adopted all six core functions needed to meet health record technology goals. certified electronics Phase 3 (CEHRT) of the program. Data interoperability in healthcare is not a matter of course.
Incompatible data silos and datasets remain another barrier. In a 2019 article in the journal JCO . Clinical Oncology Informatics, The researchers analyzed data from the Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), specifically looking at nine lung and brain research datasets containing 659 data fields to understand what would be needed to be satisfied. harmonize data for cross-study access. The effort took over 329 hours over six months, simply to identify 41 overlapping data fields in three or more files, and to harmonize 31 of them.
