As the push toward accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical homes gathers steam, health IT clearly has huge roles to play in the transition. But one capability is perhaps more crucial than any other: business intelligence (BI).

 

Gathering reams of data from EHRs is all well and good, after all. But actually synthesizing, analyzing, making sense of and reporting all that clinical and financial information is what really counts.

Business intelligence shouldn't just work alone, however. It's best put to use in tandem with the other emerging tools in the IT ecosystem.

 

Lynne Dunbrack, program director at IDC Health Insights, says lately she's been "hearing a lot about combining health information exchange and BI and analytics: having HIE be the underlying foundation, and using its natural data aggregation capabilities, then laying on top of that the BI and analytics to support accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes and population health management."

 

Not everyone is that advanced – yet. "I think for folks who haven't implemented electronic medical records, who are now using the stimulus funding as a reason for investing, you are just now focusing on meaningful use," says Dunbrack.

 

But "for those who have been early adopters, and have implemented EMRs, and are beginning to deploy health information exchange, now that they have electronic data to share with others, either within their enterprise or externally to regional or state health information exchanges, now they're in a position where they can use this electronic data and really start measuring their business performance, their clinical performance and really start to optimize how they're providing care."

 

Even those late to the party should soon be getting on board, integrating BI with their existing capabilities, however.

 

It's a matter of knowing how to "connect up the pieces,” Dunbrack says. Start with meaningful use – and "health information exchange is a requirement of meaningful use."

 

Next, it's time to "start looking at how to position for accountable care. And that really requires that organizations make investments in business intelligence and analytics tools, both business and clinical," she says.

 

But of course, it's not enough to just analyze the data. It's crucial to make sense of the right data, in the right ways.

 

"One of the challenges is, has the data been normalized, has it been cleansed, has it been quality-assured?" says Dunbrack. "Those are very important steps in order to ensure a good foundation such that you can run those tools effectively."

 

Moreover, it's important to "understand what it is that you want to measure," she says. "What are the quality metrics? Is it business performance? Administrative/financial performance? Or clinical performance?"

It's key, she adds, to have buy-in from the top – and buy-in from physicians, depending what those measures are.

 

As for picking the right vendor, there are many options – and more, it seems, every day. "We're seeing a number of tools on the market," says Dunbrack. "Generally speaking, we see the enterprise vendors like

Oracle and IBM, we also see specialty vendors that focus on healthcare analytic tools. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach."

 

One thing to keep aware of, as analytics tools come to the fore, is that many firms are looking to get a piece of the pie. "There are a lot of vendors wanting to fill out their portfolio," says Dunbrack. "We get asked quite often, 'Who are the natural acquisition targets?'"

 

As larger companies look for "neat tools that could really help round out their tool sets," provider organizations need to ask themselves when looking at vendors, "If I go with this vendor, will they be acquired? And will that be a good thing? Will it give them more resources, both financial and technical, to build on their platform? Or will it make them change direction?"

 

But that's the nature, nowadays, of the BI beast. Such, says Dunbrack, are the vagaries of "a marketplace that's really hot."

Judy Hanover, research director at IDC Health Insights, pointed out three trends that providers should pay attention to when thinking about the healthcare business intelligence sector.

1. Enabling accountability. Hanover sees forward-looking BI tools to support ACOs as the big trend, with vendors "preparing packaged analytics to support organizations who plan to operate or join an accountable care organization or other accountable delivery network."

 

2. Analytics as a service. She sees a big upswing in analytics as a service, with vendors focusing on their ability to deliver actionable analytics, online and on-demand, to healthcare organizations.

 

3. Cloud based analytics. As with so much else in healthcare these days, Hanover sees an uptick in "analytics tools, computing capabilities, storage and reports that are hosted or implemented via the cloud."