Courtesy of Chris Seper of Med City
Everyone is telling hospital systems to dig into their
data to improve their budgets and their patients. But where should
they start?
Ken Armstrong, a senior vice president of
information technology and informatics atProMedica, has his own
starter guide for hospitals digging into healthcare Big Data. He
was part of a panel discussion at the HIMSS2012 conference in Las
Vegas, and has been spending much of his time crunching data in
order to cut costs and improve performance at ProMedica, which has
health systems in northwest Ohio and southeast
Michigan.
Armstrong says healthcare Big Data for hospitals begins with
quality and satisfaction, as well as readmittance rates.
"Data is really not useful until it's information," Armstrong
said. "We have broken it up into two pieces," which includes
"concurrent data" that informs staff about things that are about to
happen, and "trended data," which is about strategic, long-term
information.