By Kobi Margolin
In earlier posts, we’ve written about the importance of adopting new, advanced technology to achieve the clinical and business rewards that “early adopters” typically experience. Clinical analytics—sometimes referred to as big data analytics—is a technology that holds great promise for healthcare organizations of all sizes. Surveys show that large health systems are actively exploring and adopting analytics technology.
But it’s not just large healthcare delivery organizations that should implement these analytics applications. Small practices, even solo practitioners, must explore the tools available to them where they can harness the power of big data analytics to improve quality and lower costs, which can end up benefiting larger systems as well by preventing hospital readmissions and improving patient outcomes.
Cloud-based tools available today allow a clinician to use powerful analytics engines to create a wide range of meaningful reports, sans IT support. Using their own data, a small practice, or an outpatient clinic that is affiliated with a large health system, can quickly analyze clinical quality improvement efforts or risk-based payment programs by allowing them to visualize their own performance.
This is a critical point because whether a clinician is a solo practitioner or working in a large health system, empowering them with powerful analytics tools provides valuable insights. That’s why technology scalability is so important, so even if the tool is only utilized by one physician to study performance in a single outpatient clinic or department, modern analytics applications can combine data from that one facility and compare it against much larger data sets, such as the patient population of the entire health system, or any cohort. Using a cloud-based analytics platform, that also normalizes data from these multiple clinical sources, can offer this kind of scalability and be deployed much faster than local server-based systems. A cloud-based platform also provides the ability to share information across care settings, including inpatient, ambulatory, long-term care facilities and home care providers.
The Clinigence platform offers all of these functions and puts the power of big data analytics into the hands of clinicians. This is one of the reasons that Clinigence was among seven companies chosen this year to participate in the New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA). Health systems that participate in this program have been on the forefront of sharing data with physicians in their communities. Clinigence is helping them translate shared data into population health insights.