During normal times, managers often make decisions based on their knowledge and experience; analysis of data to varying degrees informs that decision-making process. Circumstances change at an easily manageable pace, errors in judgment can be corrected, and the impact of those poor choices is often insignificant. During a healthcare crisis, however, the cost of being wrong is exponential.
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From Snow to Achuff: Using Analytics to Drive Clinical Change
John Snow, the English physician whose work arguably helped to halt an 1854 London cholera epidemic, is considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology. Drawing on his knowledge of statistics, Snow decided to plot …
Continue readingEnterprise Analytics: Data, Insight, Process Change, Repeat
In 1966, Avedis Donabedian proposed a conceptual model for examining health services and evaluating quality of care. The Donabedian model includes three pillars: structure, process, and outcomes. As organizations strive to excel in healthcare’s world …
Continue readingDigitally Driven: Link Technology to Process Change
There are essentially two types of dashboards: point analytics dashboards and surveillance dashboards. Point analytics dashboards, sometimes described as ad-hoc analytics reports, focus on examining data to identify the potential cause of an unwanted outcome. …
Continue readingAI: Augmented Intelligence or Electric Sheep?
Visionary Elon Musk fears it. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking worried about it. Microsoft’s Bill Gates embraces it. Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote about androids having the capacity to dream because of it. At HIMSS 2019, everyone talked about it.
Continue readingBelieving is Seeing
Data collection and its use surrounds us. Our mobile phones trace where we live, work, buy our groceries, and visit friends. Today’s trip to some online shopping sites shows me ads for puppies (my children …
Continue readingA Health IT Soothsayer
One of the best parts about predicting the future is how rarely the soothsayer is held accountable. The famous Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, is popularly credited with predicting the rise of Hitler …
Continue readingMusings on Patient Safety, Processes, and HIT
Information technology systems are evolving. The goal is to use healthcare information technology to identify the best care processes and use the technology to ensure that these best processes are utilized worldwide.
Continue readingAnalytics: Act Like an EIS Officer
Analytics software presents a growing ever-present danger to organizations that do not understand how to best utilize the reports generated. Effective data governance requires that an overall objective for the analytics be set in advance of running reports.
Continue readingEMRs: Are We There Yet?
Despite the evolution and investment in EMRs over the past five decades, little evidence exists that all this digitization is making a difference in quality, safety, or cost.
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