Prioritize data in the context of overall objectives

If you consider data as the root of the process-improvement tree, then clinical data may well be considered the root of a care-management tree.

This care-management tree has many branches: medication adherence, hospital readmission prevention, better coordination of care, closing gaps in care, etc. All of them depend on broad, healthy roots to grow.

IMPROVE CARE MANAGEMENT

Examples include: identify and intervene with members at risk for emergency department visits due to medication non-adherence; identify and intervene with members at risk for adverse drug events; and narrow the time between hospital discharge and active care management.

For example, while lab values are essential to identifying gaps in care and whether outcomes are improving, they can be difficult to integrate into a patient-centric database because the data capture is discrete and remote.

While the need for more robust and sophisticated use of clinical data is likely to grow within your enterprise, supporting a discrete service is a more manageable and realistic first step for deploying clinical data analytics than looking at a broader shift in your enterprise technology.

Ahmed Ghouri, MD, is chief medical officer and co-founder of Anvita Health.