Health Management Technology: Cognizant’s Healthcare Consulting Practice Head Talks About Making Clinical Data Analytics Count

“Leveraging clinical data analytics for quality care at lower costs can be accomplished in many ways,” says Patricia Birch. “One, predictive analytics can be applied to identify those individuals within a population that are most likely to respond to care management interventions. Two, clinical data analytics can be leveraged to measure trends in disease prevalence and population risk profiles. And three, analytics can be utilized to evaluate the relative effectiveness of specific care management programs on engaging patients in better self-care, improving overall population health status and reducing acute and emergent care events. In addition, assessing and confirming the correlations between perceived data patterns/trends – and revising care management strategies and interventions accordingly – has proven to be an effective component of industry-leading population health management programs.”

When asked if healthcare organizations were collecting too much data to make meaningful decisions, thereby generating waste, Birch says, “Healthcare organizations across the value chain do collect hundreds of thousands of diverse data elements, both in structured and unstructured format, from across the healthcare ecosystem…Whether the large amount of data collected per consumer is a waste or not is determined by how this data is used and what information is derived from the available data. Data collection practices need to be revised on a continuous basis to assess the usefulness of certain data types and sources. Most stakeholders are challenged by data gaps, insufficient data sources and data quality gaps, in part due to challenges around security and privacy, multiple data standards and inconsistency in data collection practices. This situation, though challenging, can be turned around to develop consumer and patient insights by embracing analytics, ushering in a culture of collaboration among healthcare players to contextualize the insights generated with the societal behavior and lifestyle pattern of the consumer.”

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