There's no shortage of health data, and it's growing at a rapid clip, but experts in the field cite challenges around making that information useful, readable and relevant to the physicians and patients who need it most.
The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has more than 100 TB of Medicare claims data. This information, combined with peer-reviewed medical research, informs healthcare policy and helps institutions compare their quality metrics. Like any good atlas, it also uses data-driven maps to prove its points.
If the accountable care organization is to avoid the fate of the health maintenance organization, then ACOs need to take advantage of the data that HMOs lacked in the 1990s -- and realize that holding, viewing and using data are different concepts that each come with different issues.
The clinical data warehouse used to represent what was wrong with healthcare IT: An incomplete data source that was siloed to boot. But Texas Children's Hospital has turned its data warehouse into a valuable tool for clinical and operational analytics.