ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Healthcare systems are grappling with the best ways to optimize the value of their data to bring about transformational change in response to relentless challenges. Philip R.O. Payne, one of the nation’s leading biomedical informatics experts, discusses how Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis/BJC HealthCare is working with collaborators, both internally and externally, to apply its vast data troves to create practical solutions to pressing problems.
Healthcare systems worldwide have been grappling for decades with the challenges of how best to utilize and share the data they collect. They are hoping that insights extracted from their data troves can provide innovative solutions to their intractable problems related to unsustainable costs, inequitable access to care, and stagnant patient outcomes and mortality rates. Managed properly, healthcare system data has the potential to advance medicine in remarkable ways and improve the overall efficiency and efficacy of very fragmented, inefficient delivery of care. COVID-19 has accelerated some kinds of collaborations—and highlighted the urgent need for even more transformation.
But data within healthcare systems remains largely unwieldy, fragmented, and formatted heterogeneously in ways that make it difficult to extract, limiting its ability to provide consistently reliable insights that translate into meaningful transformation of care. Moreover, complicated questions regarding ownership of data, privacy, accessibility, terminology, and quality remain unsettled.
At the same time, updates to US regulations that require healthcare systems to share an increasing amount of patient data with patients, each other, and with other stakeholders, namely payors, hold promise for more innovation and opportunities. Beginning October 6, 2022, for example, healthcare systems and payors are required by law to share all electronic patient data with patients, with some exceptions.
