Archive for category Policy

Richard Noffsinger is CEO of Anvita Health

Last week’s hoopla surrounding President Obama’s first 100 days in office kept the spotlight trained on the health care IT portion of the stimulus package, but did little to tighten its focus.

To borrow a line delivered by the president in his 100^th day speech, “I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made, but I’m not satisfied.”

There’s been a lot of buzz regarding the demand – and anticipated incentives – for broad implementation of electronic medical records (EMRs). While I salute this as an initial step toward improving patient safety and lowering healthcare costs, it’s not the giant leap forward that many believe it is. When projecting out what’s possible to accomplish with existing health care IT over the next decade, EMR implementation is more the starting block than the finish line.

The giant leap that this administration should be planning for is a more comprehensive and qualified use of EMRs. To be clear, HIMSS is playing an important role in defining meaningful use of EMRs, and its inclusion of clinical decision support CDS in that definition is a critical and telling move that simply digitizing and integrating patient data isn’t enough to achieve adequate improvements in U.S. health care. What’s missing is analytics.

As the CEO of an advanced CDS and clinical analytics company, I see every day the low-hanging fruit that payers can easily grasp with the development and implementation of an analytics strategy to accompany the implementation of EMRs.

Harnessing available data and translating it into truly actionable health intelligence is not an easy task, and by the same token, neither is creating an analytics strategy.

The universe of patient data that could be made available for analysis is mind-boggling, but even more stunning is the potency of intelligence that data represents. In addition to unwarranted privacy concerns, it’s the lack of analytics strategies that keeps even the most progressive health care companies from realizing the value of patient data.

Approaches to incorporating analytics into EMRs and other digital health delivery systems has been tentative and fragmented at best. Expectations are low.

Companies like Anvita Health have spent the time and energy to consider all the possible ways patient data can help payers, PHR and EMR vendors, and health care providers improve the quality of health care. A few examples:

· Analyzing health and pharma claims to generate intelligent inferences about a patient’s condition has the potential of both reducing false positives and uncovering previously undiscovered diagnoses.

· Using prospective analysis can predict for a hospital the probability of CMS “never events” happening to its existing patient base, and provide a precise prioritization of beds and related protocols to prevent these events from occurring.

· The use of real-time analytics can transform the corner pharmacist into a life-changing hero by giving him or her the tools needed for a personalized, behavior-driven intervention at the point of care, when patients are most likely to listen and learn.

I recently attended the World Health Care Congress where concepts like predictive modeling and real-time analytics are starting to get some traction in keynotes and hallway discussions. I’d like to remind my colleagues in the health care industry that these are not just concepts – they are analytics strategies that can be put to use now. All that’s missing is a more widespread understanding of how advanced health care analytics can be used to help organizations achieve what might otherwise be considered unreachable quality and cost savings objectives.

That understanding is the giant step we’re working toward, and it’s an essential step in realizing the meaningful change that this administration expects.

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I’d like to welcome you to the Anvita Health Blog, where you’ll hear from members of the Anvita Health team on a variety of health care analytics issues.

Richard Noffsinger has served as CEO of Anvita Health since 2007. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the information technology and health care industries.