The two top uses cases for analytics in healthcare are financial and care quality measures, according to a Dimensional Insight report.  

Healthcare IT News sister company HIMSS Analytics conducted the survey.

WHAT THE DATA SAYS

Among the 110 senior healthcare leaders polled, about a third of those organizations that have not yet deployed analytics but plan to do said population health would be a top focus area, while some 60 percent said effectiveness of care would be a central focus. 

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Just 28 percent of respondents said they are using analytics for effectiveness of care projects, with 22 percent using analytics for population health and 11 percent deploying analytics for chronic care management.

ON THE RECORD

 “Clinicians will effectively use data for decision-making when it is integrated into their workflows, but that is seldom the case at this point.” Dimensional Insight Vice President George Dealy said in a statement. “Projects that “healthcare organizations can more easily wrap their arms around are those that might use clinical data — such as for readmissions improvement — but are focused on improving processes that have financial implications as opposed to directly improving patient care.”

WHAT ELSE TO KNOW

The survey also revealed healthcare leaders rate clinical staff (physicians and nurses) the lowest among five categories of stakeholders on their ability to drive decisions through their use of analytics.

On a scale of one to seven (1=extremely low) the average score of stakeholders to drive decisions through analytics was around a five. On that scale, healthcare leaders rated clinical staff 15 percent lower than the average.

The report concluded that physicians and nurses are the least empowered within healthcare organizations to make data-driven decisions.

“In order to enable greater clinician use of data, hospitals and health systems need to make data and analytics more accessible to physicians and nurses and make it part of the provider workflow,” the study said.

THE BIGGER TREND

More than 60 percent of payers and providers say they plan to increase their analytics budgets by 15 percent or more, according to an April report from the Society of Actuaries.

The report further finds that 89 percent of healthcare executives plan to use predictive analytics in the next five years, as health systems and health plans alike understand how critical good clinical and business intelligence is to organizational success.

Meanwhile, the Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently launched a competition to explore how predictive data analytics could help forecast future trends in healthcare spending. 

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin.

Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com

Twitter: @dropdeaded209 

Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.