case mangagement/technology/Tools for Practice Tuesday

Population Health at #HIMSS18: Making Big Data Small

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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.

addictions/mental health/technology

Run To The Cloud?

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This year I have the privilege of attending the HIMSS (Health Information and Management Systems Society) as a social media ambassador. The opening keynote was former CEO and current adviser to Google Eric Schmidt. Conference organizers were smart because who better to inspire a group of health technologists and stakeholders than the CEO of Google? Also juxtaposing his talk with attending talks about the barrier and opportunities of care coordination technology was an interesting exercise.

Mr. Schmidt opened his speech talked about the idea of “Dr. Liz”. An interface that you would use voice technology to interact around medicine. He said that this use case it not that far away and laid out ways and reasons why. First and foremost his advice was to “Run to the cloud… and fast”. That cloud computing has become an effective tool for other industries to aggregate information in a quick way so that it can better inform decisions. Not only that but it is a more secure way to do it.

He discussed the opportunities of technology like natural language processing, AI, and cognitive computing to accelerate and assist healthcare with decisions and workflow management… Sounds great right? To have computers come along and learn from the data we enter. He highlighted Google’s recent success in using retinal scans to detect heart problems.

His talk, although inspiring, felt like it was missing something. Mr. Schmidt’s argument is that Healthcare was far behind compared to other industries in there use of information technology. It was a great call to action as a “run to the cloud and do amazing things” message was important. It felt like there was missing something.

Rewind to a talk I attended earlier in the day about the opportunities and barriers of putting mental health and substance abuse into an Health Information Exchange (HIE). There exists a regulatory burden about coordinating and substance abuse care… The dreaded “42 CFR Part 2” requiring a separate release of information for substance use treatment. ((Here is a quick primer on the issue and the latest) This is often a barrier to coordinating care, especially electronically.

To aggregate information in this area can be a challenge and behavioral health and substance abuse would not be easily integrated into Mr. Schmidt’s view of the world. However I was encouraged but the work for CORHIO in Colorado; they are doing excellent work building more behavioral health and substance abuse info into a health information exchange. They created a campaign as part of the HIE to educate patients and providers about the how they can share behavioral health information on an HIE. It is called “Choose To Care” and you can find more information about it here.

So Mr. Schmidt asked “What is taking so long?” to accelerate Health IT. There exists a regulatory burden it becomes easy to sit on our hands and do nothing about it. Seeing mental health and substance abuse in it’s own technology silo is frustrating. It would be easy for me to dismiss his argument and say “hey that might work for Google but in the real world it …” The hard part is putting our heads together and coming up with a solution. I look forward to learning more solutions.

I also captured his talk in this twitter moment..