Today I wanted to pair two seemingly unrelated tweets to talk about the shift that’s happening in healthcare and also what I hope is happening. Let’s start off with the big announcement that Mayo Clinic is starting to share it’s algorithms that improve patient outcomes on the Apervita platform.
@MayoClinic to Publish its #Algorithms to Improve Patient Outcomes http://t.co/h1D5c4uzlA #digitalhealth #hitsm pic.twitter.com/roI0CJls8e
— HIT Consultant Media (@hitconsultant) February 27, 2015
I’ve long wanted some way for algorithms that are discovered to be easily shared. I’ll admit that I haven’t dug into the Apervita platform yet, but I’m interested in seeing how they’re trying to solve the problem of algorithm sharing. I’ll be looking to see what their business model is and if it makes sense from everyone’s perspective. It’s a challenging problem that I’d love for people to solve since it will make our healthcare system better.
This next tweet dives into the question of data versus the actual result of improving health:
“Today we suffer not from a lack of data, but a lack of adherence.” —@TomMorrowMD https://t.co/FPyBv1HPvV #HITsm pic.twitter.com/UgEcmJHmMR
— Dr. Thomas Morrow (@TomMorrowMD) February 27, 2015
I agree with Dr. Morrow that we have a lot of data and we haven’t done much to get all the value we could out of that data. Plus, even if you have great data, there’s a gap between understanding the data and getting the patient or doctor to do something about that data.
I love these two topics paired together, because I think the first step to converting data to adherence is to find the right algorithms that analyze the data. The right algorithms can indicate who to engage with to improve adherence. In many ways, getting people to improve adherence won’t be a tech solution at all. Instead it will be a human interaction that was prompted by great algorithms that poured over all the data we do have. That’s a powerful concept and one that needs to be shared.