Coming out of HIMSS, everyone said that healthcare analytics was a major discussion. I talked to someone from Allscripts today and they quoted me that something like 42% of their business is coming from population health (analytics, patient portal, and HIE) functionality. Today someone else told me that the future of healthcare IT is going to really be around analytics and how we use the data. When you think about future revenue streams, the data is likely going to be the center of most business models.
Analytics is going to play a major role in the future of health IT and I believe will lead to really important improves in the care patients receive. My guess is that one day we’ll look back on the EHR of today and wonder how we saw patients with such limited data and intelligence built into the EHR.
However, Sheri Stoltenberg from Stoltenberg Consulting made a great comment to me at HIMSS which is the title of this blog post: Healthcare Analytics is a Big Privacy Issue.
While we love to talk about the benefits of big healthcare data and the value of healthcare analytics, it’s also got a lot of big privacy issues that I think we’re going to need to address. Many will argue that we already have HIPAA and that should be enough. Certainly it will provide the framework for privacy and security of healthcare data and analytics. However, that’s likely going to need to evolve as the healthcare analytics involves. I’m not sure we even know the issues that healthcare analytics will pose to privacy in 5 years. Unfortunately, I don’t see HIPAA being able to keep up with it.
If the healthcare IT industry were smart, it would start working together and appropriate privacy and security within healthcare analytics. If they don’t, be ready for the government to step in and impose it on them. We know how that usually works out.
Hopefully this blog post will be inspiration for every organization to consider the privacy and security issues associated with their healthcare analytics.