How can we harness data to provide better healthcare?

Introduction

In this digital age, data is a valuable resource with the power to transform industries and revolutionize healthcare. By extracting insights from vast amounts of information, we can enhance the quality, accessibility, and personalization of health services. This article explores how harnessing data can tackle pressing healthcare challenges and maximize value for patients, providers, and society as a whole.

How to make Data Effective

We are overwhelmed with data today. While we have a national e-health record, it doesn't attempt to harness information from personal fitness devices and apps, our genome or isolated databases in medical, nursing or allied health systems. Is the sheer volume of data, not to mention velocity or speed at which it is created, now part of the problem? In a September 2022 research, Glaser et al examined the steps that are required to put data to work.

1. Evaluate Quality.

- Are we doing the right things? Are our current methodologies effective?

- Are we getting the desired outcomes? Are our targeted results being achieved?

- What needs to change? What alterations are necessary for improvement?

These are challenging questions to answer. The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, along with counterparts in other countries, aims to measure outcome indicators, explore under-performance reasons, and devise improvement strategies. Simply increasing resources (spending more money) is rarely the solution when outcomes don't meet expectations. Often, the issue lies in our current approach. Healthcare is not a production line, and people are not mere units of production. The determinants of health primarily involve environmental and behavioral factors (refer to diagram), rather than solely relying on the healthcare system. Therefore, we need to broaden our focus to include these additional variables, even if it further complicates data volume and speed.

2. Leverage Claims Data

This business process holds potential for clinical improvement. While integral to business practices, claims data alone fall short of providing comprehensive clinical insights. While claims data inform us about the services rendered, they do not capture or report on outcomes. Additionally, claims data often become outdated by the time they are consolidated, spanning weeks or even months. By designing modern data systems, we can enable real-time reporting and establish connections for both population and individual health enhancement.

3. Digital Measures and Monitoring

As mentioned earlier, the national e-health record does not currently utilize information from personal fitness devices, apps, genomics, or sensor-based data in medical, nursing, or allied health systems. However, combining these datasets with Quality and Claims data has the potential to enhance both population and individual healthcare. By employing machine learning, we can leverage its capacity to process the vast amount of data generated and identify patterns, both positive and negative, empowering healthcare professionals to gain valuable insights.

4. Avoid unnecessary duplication of efforts

In 2015, Britnell conducted a comprehensive analysis of over 25 healthcare systems across 60 countries, revealing that no single country excels in every aspect. However, each country possesses unique strengths that others can learn from. Denmark and Estonia, for example, have emerged as pioneers in digitization. By studying their successes and any missteps they encountered along the way, we can navigate the path toward progress more effectively.

A To-Do List to harness data to improve healthcare

What should we do? Addressing these challenges is crucial to ensure an equitable, sustainable, and consistently effective healthcare system. While governance and regulation play a role, they are limited in their ability to tackle these complex issues. To drive locally relevant innovation and improvement, it is essential to gather feedback from both teams and individuals. Moreover, remuneration based on outcomes such as quality, availability, affordability, and personalization, rather than just volume, is fundamental in supporting continuous innovation and improvement.

I. Reduce the cost of data collection, and improve its timeliness. To enhance the efficiency of data collection in healthcare, we must focus on reducing costs and improving timeliness. The digital realm offers a unique advantage in achieving this balance. By leveraging apps and wearable devices, data can be automatically uploaded via cost-effective and speedy networks. It is imperative to design healthcare delivery systems that embrace automation for data collection, eliminating outdated paper-based methods and time-consuming manual data extraction techniques. This approach not only improves the timeliness of data but also reduces costs, ensuring a more streamlined and effective healthcare system.

II. Expand the range of collected data. By establishing a connection between the social determinants of health (refer to the figure) and healthcare outcomes, we can unlock fresh opportunities to enhance the quality, accessibility, and affordability of healthcare. For instance, by linking income or education levels with the likelihood of developing certain conditions, we can develop preventive strategies. Additionally, by combining data such as nutrition intake and exercise regimens with medical records, healthcare providers are better placed to devise personalized care plans tailored to individual needs.

III. Leverage clinical and business process healthcare data. Apply analytical tools and machine learning to unlock actionable insights from the data. Process automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have the potential to decrease the administrative burden in delivering clinical care while enhancing clinical decision-making and actions. To foster collaboration among the various stakeholders in healthcare, we require tools that facilitate seamless communication and cooperation. By applying analytics, we can identify patterns that improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery.

IV. Establish a digital foundation to enhance processes for gathering, analyzing, and reporting data, as well as measuring quality and outcomes. This will enhance the transparency and usefulness of data, and strengthen its linkages. Currently, we face challenges due to differing approaches and focuses among funders, regulators, and professional societies. As a result, there are significant variations in care that do not contribute to the quality, affordability, accessibility, or availability of healthcare.

What should be the impacts of digital healthcare?

By implementing data-driven processes in healthcare, similar to those used in other industries, we can enhance efficiency, personalization, and quality for the betterment of healthcare. This will result in benefits for patients, providers, and society as a whole.

• Clinicians can improve their clinical performance and cost-effectiveness.

• Patients can make more informed, inclusive choices that are tailored to the factors that matter to them.

• Payers can better serve their patients and healthcare providers with more cost-effective quality care.

How does SurgicalOrder help?

SurgicalOrder embodies the potential of digital transformation in healthcare, supporting the principles discussed in this article. It enhances healthcare delivery efficiency by streamlining the surgical equipment ordering and management process. By digitizing this process, SurgicalOrder reduces data collection costs and improves timeliness.

The platform collects and analyzes a wide range of data, including equipment usage trends and supplier performance, expanding the collected data range. This provides valuable insights to optimize operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

SurgicalOrder establishes a digital foundation for data gathering, analysis, and reporting, strengthening transparency and enhancing data usefulness. Using advanced analytics, SurgicalOrder leverages healthcare data to provide actionable insights, enabling informed decisions on surgical equipment and enhancing care quality.

Further readings

• Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare https://www.safetyandquality.gov.au

• Britnell M. ‘In Search of the Perfect Health System’, Bloomsbury Academic 2015

• Glaser J et al. How to Use Digital Health Data to Improve Outcomes. HBR Online 12SEP22 - Reprint request H077XR