This week, I’m down in Atlanta, GA for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2010 Annual Conference & Exhibition. In addition to a full schedule of appointments and breakout sessions, I was also looking forward to exchanging chilly New England and a predicted snowstorm for some Atlanta sunshine. Of course, on my first day in GA, I was told that temperatures back in Hartford, CT were warmer than they’ve been in months and not a flake in the sky. Go figure. Here’s hoping it stays warm when I head home, armed with some new insights about factors affecting Business Intelligence in the healthcare industry.
Just thought I’d share some of the interesting tidbits I gathered during yesterday’s seminars and breakouts.
- HIMSS annual IT report states that only 33% of the 3900 hospitals submitting their annual reports have implemented Business Intelligence as of 2009.
- Dan Hesse – CEO for Sprint and keynote speaker for Monday – mentioned that wireless apps for healthcare are supposed to grow from 304M to 5B in next 5 years. From the ability to get Blue Ray-quality pictures right on handhelds in the operating room, to the ability to put wireless devices in a patient so that a doctor can keep track of levels of medicine in the blood and how the patient is responding without coming into the office for a test, there are certainly some amazing uses for wireless healthcare apps.
- Amazingly – healthcare providers wash or disinfect their hands in less than half of the situations where they should! At Cedar-Sinai in LA they actually increased that rate up to 65 percent by offering $10 Starbucks gift cards. But in order to get it to 80%, they had to get the hospital’s epidemiologist to culture each doctor’s hand in a sterile petri dish. The resulting cultures were photographed. The images were – in the exact words of the epidemiologist — “disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.” Yuck. I know many hospitals are engaging BI and Performance Management tools like dashboards to help increase the rate of hand washing…and thanks to this vivid imagery, I’m even more enthused about that trend.
- The Republican Representative for Georgia — Tom Price — was not aware that Puerto Rico did not get included in the ARRA bill, which has allowed many hospitals to fund their Business Intelligence initiatives. It was sort of a surprise when he was asked about it in the session on Policy. He managed to handle it pretty well in spite of some aggressive questioning by a Hospital manager from San Juan.
Particularly during this legislative season—when healthcare is on everyone’s mind—it’s been eye-opening to be here at the epicenter of healthcare IT and management thought…even if it meant missing the first unofficial day of spring at home.
Day 2. More Healthcare BI Notes from HIMSS
Winter continued here in Atlanta yesterday morning. Snowshowers were the backdrop for everyone who’s here attending the HIMSS conference. Quite an amazing conference as there are some 30K+ people here to participate in the extensive sessions and training tracks. I’ve met a wide variety of people in the continuum of care and supporting technology offerings and services.
More highlights from yesterday’s sessions:
- Susan DeVore, CEO of Premier, gave a great presentation on Data Driven Quality. Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing was mentioned a number of times throughout the presentation — and highlighted in one slide as a solution for saving as much as 52.2B in misuse of drug treatments resulting in adverse affects. Apparently Premier is working on a “Waste Index” (although she mentioned they may tinker with that name a bit) and the primary KPIs would include Staffing and its affect on Overtime charges. This made me think of all the times we have helped our Kronos and ADP customers get a handle on those costs. She also talked a lot about Cloud Computing and how Business Intelligence and Cloud Computing are eventually key to bringing some of these costs in line on a very large scale.
- Attended the Google breakout session on Google’s EHealth solutions. Pretty interesting approach, as they are much more focused on coming at electronic medical health records from the individual’s perspective. They’ve not talked much yet about how partners can write against their API for true Business Intelligence-type solutions, and it’s unclear where and how BI would fit into the mix. But, my guess is that certain hospital systems will eventually be taking a long look at Google and Microsoft as viable cloud computing partners as more and more focus on EHR becomes a cloud-based discussion. In a discussion about this with Jay Spence from SAP BusinessObjects, he told me about how he was commenting to some of the kids on his son’s soccer team saying “you’re dribbling as if you’re in a phone booth” and one of the kids responded with “what’s a phone booth??” You gotta imagine that someday soon some hot shot snowboarder is going to walk into the ER in Brekenridge and pull up his own medical records right on his iPhone when he takes a header and breaks a knee.
- Kent Gale, Chairman for KLAS, provided a good sized audience with the state of software vendors out in the market today. Thought it was interesting to note that MEDITECH has one of the larger market shares for Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) for hospitals over 200 beds — but they have a lower adoption for CPOE. Still, they have made significant strides in the last year. He then highlighted that MEDITECH and CPSI own the sub-200 bed space and that the MEDITECH v6 apparently demos really well, but it’s still unknown how it will roll out per se. Amazingly, only 12% of those in their survey either have or are in the process of deploying CPOE.
- David Garets, President and CEO of HIMSS Analytics, followed up on Kent’s presentation with a lot of very interesting numbers. Apparently, as you might imagine with all the money flowing into healthcare, 55% of IT budgets are expected to grow in 2010 and 2011, with 20% staying put and the remaining 25% falling. I thought this was amazing: For their Level 7 (which has a heavy focus on Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence) on EMR meaningful use, only .7% of all hospitals have achieved that level. That leaves 99.3% that are on the outside looking in. What’s really amazing is that by 2015, in order for a hospital to show “meaningful use” for the Government, they will all need to get to Level 7. Now you can see why David was saying that one of the largest areas of focus within healthcare in the next few years will be BI.
I’ll check back in before heading to the airport tomorrow for what hopes to be an uneventful flight home — here’s hoping the weather breaks soon.
Day 3. Final Healthcare BI Thoughts from HIMSS 2010
I flew home late Wednesday after the final day for me at HIMSS. I’m bummed I didn’t get to stick around and go to the Atlanta Aquarium and see the final keynote with Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who managed that miraculous landing on the Hudson. I did manage to sit in on a session in the morning – presented by Patricia Flateley Brennan, RN, PhD – Promoting Health through Better Personal Health Information Management.
One aspect I liked about the presentation is that it took into consideration the whole ecosystem of personal health management needs, how it’s done today, and what needs to be done going forward to transition from provider-focused systems to consumer-facing technologies.
She focused on the 5 different environments she felt that PHRs need to address: living, social, psychological, technological, and health services, as well as the issue that people need access to clinical records – but the focus on access is just not enough – people need to interact with it and get the benefits of decision support. People need information at the point of living.
One of the key areas of interest seems to be around Medication Management. She highlighted one great example with a video from her Project Health Design efforts. In the video, an older gentleman was managing his prescriptions at home with a bar code scanner, and the laptop was beeping if it was the wrong medication to be taking, or his cell phone was waking him out of a nap to remind him to take his meds, or he was putting data into the smart phone at dinner to determine the impact of his meal on his diabetes.
Lots of good examples on how the PHR would enable doctors and patients to monitor daily living – how many times I can’t sleep at night so that there is more accurate collaboration on how to shape daily health decisions for both parties involved.
Pretty cool stuff indeed, but her emphasis was the need to get to a common platform in order to make this work so they can do solid data integration, accelerate interoperability and improve security.
Certainly, there are a lot of ethical, legal and social issues for this to become a true reality, but the future is one where these types of solutions will need to be commonplace if we’re going to improve Health Information Technology and provide a better product for less cost to society as a whole.