Attending #HIMSS18, I was eager to learn more about population health and health information technology’s role in achieving goals. This is something I felt very strongly that social work should be leaders in. The 2018 Health Information Management and Systems Society taught me that health information technology helps make big population health data small. And as always social work should have a seat at the table to provide our expertise.
EHR’s typically have dashboards to gain insights about your population. However data analytics experts can help take a deeper dive into how this can help inform clinical care. I had the pleasure of coming to a greater understanding of this concept with data analytics companies “HBIsolutions” and “Qlik Healthcare”.
HBI Solutions
Looking at population health data can assist with suicide prevention in your patient population. I got a demonstration about how you can use ER data to better understand suicide risk in your population. That you can first take a look at ER visits to gain insights about frequency and risk….
After that you can journey deeper into the data to identify the higher risk clients. I was impressed by this as we often use our basic clinical knowledge to label clients as high risk. Data analytics can take this large data and drill it down to perhaps miss someone we might not be thinking as traditionally high risk…
If you are interested in looking into your data, I would encourage you to take a look at HBIsolutions.
You can find their website and also some their other success stories here.
Qlik Healthcare
I have briefly chatted with the folks at Qlik Healthcare Analytics on twitter before. It was great to meet one of their staff and talk further about how they are using data to inform care about the opioid crisis. I was reminded of the recent report they completed called “The Crisis Next Door” . They illustrated how they could use public data sets such as Medicaid, Medicare, U.S. Census data, and more to better inform care…
I learned how these heat maps can be strengthened by healthcare systems data to better understand clinical needs of your population. That combining open data with your health systems data has the potential to drive even deeper insights.
I would also recommend you visit Qlik Healthcare Solutions and as the blog suggests get a demo of the heat map solution.
I was encouraged by these examples of how data can better inform clinical care. From the social work perspective, using population health data is great example of bridging macro practice with micro practice. That looking at data systems on the larger level can help inform practices on the lower level. Much like population health itself, the social work profession needs to be more involved in the data analysis as well.
