Glenn D. Steele Jr., MD, president and chief executive officer of Geisinger Health System, says the integrated delivery network's pioneering population health programs depend on insightful use of data to drive behavior change.

Serving 43 counties over some 20,000 square miles of northeastern Pennsylvania, Geisinger provides care for more than 2.6 million people; its innovative efforts to combat diabetes, coronary disease, COPD, hypertension and other chronic ailments have been held up as examples for the rest of the country.

Steele talked with Healthcare IT recently about how Geisinger employs analytics tools to improve patient care and the bottom line. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Q: How is healthcare in general doing these days when it comes to using business intelligence and analytics?

A: Well, we're probably about to enter the 19th century. (Laughs.)

Q: Baby steps, right? But why are we so far behind other industries? What's standing in the way of smarter use of data?

A: We have legitimate regulatory concerns, and I think they've always taken precedence over true innovation in terms of how we look at our data, how we analyze it, how we distribute it. How we use it to change behavior. I don't think the balancing act between innovation and regulation is correct in most areas of healthcare data. We also have the intrinsic structural issue in healthcare, where it's been compartmentalized on both the payer and provider sides, and each of those seems to strive for an optimal function without actually any integrated structural aspirations. And that's changing as well, but obviously when you sell IT enabling into all those compartments, you're kind of handicapped right from the start.

We have a series of expectations, even in the biggest compartments that are most well-capitalized, the hospital-centrics; we have a series of expectations that up until recently were pretty simplistic: that if you put an electronic health record in it would automatically improve badly engineered and badly transacted systems. It doesn't work that way.

And then we have this great big divide between payer and provider where a huge amount of the data, which is collected on the transaction side, is kind of husbanded and treated as an intellectual property. And is either on-purpose not used, or inadvertently not usable, whether because of a lack of timeliness or a lack of functionality.