Building blocks to better data

The one thing healthcare isn’t short on is data. The industry has data coming in from all directions, but that’s not always a perfect scenario—data that is duplicated, low quality, or siloed can present barriers to better analysis. For healthcare systems to improve the way they want, data needs to be organized and unified.

“Everyone sits on so much data,” says Gregg Church, president of 4medica. “Data is great, but if it’s not well organized into meaningful buckets, it’s not as useful for providers.”

So much of healthcare works in silos, Church notes. A physician may have access to a hospital’s centralized EMR, but what if the patient has seen physicians outside that hospital as well? “How do you know the data has been normalized and is accurate?” says Church. “We’ve always had plenty of data but never figured out how to use it and be more proactive and predictive of a patient’s behavior. Why aren’t we doing something more proactive with it?”

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