The Current Buzz around Analytics
Rodney Hamilton, MD, CMIO, ICA
As we round the corner to soon approach HIMSS13, John Moore of Chilmark Research reported from HIMSS12 that the “conference buzz was analytics. It seemed as if every vendor in attendance was promoting some sort of analytics capability. It was a tad overwhelming and if I was having a problem trying to separate out all these countless vendor offerings (this is exactly what I am trained to do as an industry analyst) I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for those representatives of healthcare IT departments.”[1]
As it turns out, clinical analytics, and its broader umbrella, business intelligence, is more than a buzz. More than 80 percent of healthcare organizations are investing in business intelligence tools for clinical performance improvement, according to a new report from the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA).[2] About a quarter are spending money for data warehouses, and