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.
Continue reading
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 reading
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 reading
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 reading
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 reading
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 reading
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 reading
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.
Continue reading
The word “gerrymander” comes from the pairing of Gerry’s name with the shape of one of the contorted districts north of Boston that resembled a salamander (see Figure 1). This gerrymandering of the Massachusetts Senate proved so successful that although the Federalist party won both the election for governor and a majority of the Massachusetts House, they failed to win the Senate, then controlled by the Democratic-Republicans.
The sophisticated analytics that allow for the gerrymandering of election districts also offer a model that can be applied in the delivery of population health services.
Continue reading
Rather than considering patient information, and in particular genetic testing results, as private property to be used for private good, perhaps it is time to think of our population’s medical information as private property, owned and controlled by the patient, to be used for public good.
Continue reading