Cybersecurity, analytics and population health have the attention and dollars of healthcare organizations, which also are beginning to invest in prescriptive analytics and artificial intelligence, a new Healthcare IT News survey finds.
The need for greater cybersecurity protection is sinking in. The desire to better understand mountains of untapped data is on the rise. And the necessity to start improving the health not just of patients but of whole populations is being taken quite seriously.
These are some of the conclusions from “2017: The Year Ahead in Health IT,” a new survey of healthcare organizations from Healthcare IT News. We polled 95 healthcare executives in October 2016.
Asked which technologies they are planning to upgrade in 2017, 52 percent of survey respondents said security, 51 percent analytics, 44 percent patient engagement, 44 percent population health, 31 percent EHRs, 24 percent remote patient monitoring, and 22 percent revenue cycle management.
Joe Fisne, associate chief information officer at Geisinger Health System, observed that this spread makes sense.
“From the standpoint of security being No. 1, it certainly is one of the most critical things in healthcare today,” Fisne said. “We are in an age where technology has extended so far into the realm of healthcare that it has become one of the most critical things, so the heightened need for security follows. And analytics is key, as well. We are investing in some of the Big Data platforms to take information and demonstrate trends, practices and patterns of care, as well as patterns of illness along the way. And that goes hand in hand with population health.”
2017 also will see the arrival of technologies at many healthcare organizations. Asked which technologies they plan to introduce or investigate in 2017, 45 percent of survey respondents said analytics, 45 percent workflow improvement, 44 percent telehealth, 41 percent population health, 41 percent smart medical devices, 34 percent remote patient monitoring, and 21 percent precision medicine.
“What stands out here is the increasing importance of telehealth as a different form of access as well as a different form of connecting with consumers,” said Brian Kalis, managing director of the health practice at research and consulting firm Accenture. “Seeing telehealth with increased importance can help address labor productivity challenges in healthcare.”
Though lower in the survey results, Kalis said he finds the interest in precision medicine quite promising.
“This foreshadows what we might see accelerate in 2017 – the focus on precision medicine and the initial investments in using precision medicine to improve care,” he said. “This is an early stage trend. As well as the survey respondents’ fairly high prioritization of smart medical devices; we’ve heard from a number of health systems looking at new strategies to use patient-generated health data to improve care.”
2017 will be no different than years past with healthcare organizations will be working on their electronic health records. But the priorities for 2017 are unique to the time. Asked which types of EHR development projects are or will be in the works within their enterprises in 2017, 60 percent of survey respondents said improving interoperability, 55 percent improving workflow, 47 percent improving usability, 37 percent adding population health tools to the EHR, 28 percent migrating to the cloud, 24 percent performing a major EHR system upgrade, and 21 percent replacing the EHR at one or more sites.
All of this adds up to a very natural evolution based on the healthcare landscape today, said John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess System and a professor of medicine at Harvard University.
“When you look at the quality programs and MIPS and MACRA, suddenly you are seeing a realignment of incentives where doctors are paid for wellness and quality as opposed to quantity,” he said. “Unless you are collecting data about patients across the population, it’s really hard to control expenses, enhance quality and improve workflow. EHRs were put in basically as dumb data communication systems without emphasis on exchange and workflow. But because of payment reform, we have incentives to do data exchange. Different things are bubbling to the top.”
One aspect of EHRs many healthcare organizations continue to work on is caregiver acceptance. Asked what actions will they take in 2017 to get more physicians and nurses to fully embrace EHR technology, 60 percent of survey respondents said integrate EHRs with other technologies that, for example, advance population health or best practices, 47 percent improve EHR system interfaces, 40 percent clearly show EHRs help the organization profitably manage value-based care, and 38 percent clearly show how the technology markedly reduces time spent on tasks outside of direct patient interaction.
The “2017: The Year Ahead in Health IT” survey found population health to be a high priority with a great many healthcare organizations. Asked if their organization plans to implement a population health system in 2017, 20 percent of survey respondents said yes, they are planning to deploy a new system, a big 42 percent said yes, they will be adding tools to existing systems, 9 percent said no, they have finished their population health project, and a significant 29 percent said no, population health is not in their plans for 2017.
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