On the heels of the passage of a health care reform bill by the U.S. House of Representatives comes a profile of Intermountain Healthcare, a group of hospitals and clinics located in Utah and Idaho, in the New York Times Magazine. If you’ve been following the U.S. health care debate (those of you from the rest of the world can just snicker that we’re having such a hard time getting decent results out the most expensive “system” on the planet), you have likely heard of Intermountain as they are often held up as a model of the future of health care.
What’s different about Intermountain? They measure outcomes systematically and continually look to improve their processes and protocols based on the results of the analysis. A bit scary that they are singled out as being ususual for doing this.
A colleague tells a story about a physician friend who was extolling his new found enthusiasm for evidence-based medicine. My colleague was a bit surprised and asked, “So what were you doing before?”
The judgement of doctors, it turns out, has been the ultimate guide for decision making going back to Hippocrates. According to the Times story, up until the late 19th century medicine did more harm than good.
I’ve been looking into this issue for the past few months as I have been working with two faculty members from the Harvard School of Public Health on the second edition of their book, Renegotiating Health Care (Josey Bass, 2010). The book is about negotiation and conflict resolution and in it we look at several mega-trends that have the potential to bring new conflict into the health care system. Among them, the vast amounts of information that will now be available for analysis by more and more people and organizations. I likened it to the inversion of the old saw that what can’t be measured can’t be managed: what can be measured will be managed whether you like it or not. Or as business and technology guru Don Tapscott once said, “People who live in glass houses better be buff.”
The application of analytics to health care is critical both to containing costs and improving outcomes. However, according to the Times (and many other sources), “the pace of change is extremely slow.” Said Lucian Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health, “It may take 100 years.”
How would you speed up the adoption of analytics in health care? Have you had a good or bad health care experience where analytics were involved?
About Eric McNulty
Health care analytics will become the new scientific topic implementing all it`s systematic approach and methods .
The new physicians ,educated in basic and applied sciencies ,will become clinicians that “think EBM”.
I am the physician with more that 30 years of working experience,from basic,clinical and managerial duties.I my admitt that my analytical approach,innate and educated,create me only the difficulties among my group.
Even that,I am sure that this is the only way to move on in the health care jungle.
Happy to exchange the experience with the group from Harvard School of Public Health, the center of my continuing education from 2006.
Dr Besker Ljubica