Healthcare’s Deadly Data Problem

By LEONARD D’AVOLIO I have read with interest the ongoing conversation about the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard in THCB and beyond, not because I believe this latest effort at measuring quality will have a significant effect on patient care, but because behind the latest public metric debate – in fact behind all healthcare metric debates – is a major systemic problem.  This problem somehow always seems to remain unseen.  We acknowledge that measuring healthcare quality is difficult and that using medical data is challenging, but I’m not convinced that people completely understand why or how measurement and data are so difficult in healthcare…nor am I certain that everyone understands the repercussions of those challenges.   As I wrote here, the most promising recent development in medicine is the emphasis on learning from our data.  We are finally digitizing records of clinician and patient interactions via the adoption of EMRs.  Data warehousing technologies are connecting healthcare’s disparate systems and making data accessible to decision makers.  Data will be the foundation for healthcare improvement.  However, it is dangerous to assume that accessing raw data is equivalent to accessing relevant information. All of today’s widely adopted EMR systems were designed to fulfill three purposes:  financial reimbursement, narrative communication among clinicians, and legal protection.  Now, we aim to use that data for very different purposes: t...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs