Tag: data

Defining informatics for health center teams

I just ran across this great short post on informatics and had to share it. I wish Dr. Gibson had written this post a couple years ago when I first used the word “informatics” with my new health center colleagues. When I said the word, I might as well have been speaking Klingon — no one knew what it was — not the clinicians, the business folks, operations… no one had heard the term. Of course it didn’t help that I recommended we consider hiring an informaticist — a new position that no one knew they needed and couldn’t define. 😉

At the time, and to some degree even today, there was an expectation that mainline IT staff would fill the role of informaticist for the company. And in some small ways, we do. But not in the big ways, not in transformative ways. Our IT staff are saddled with basic systems maintenance, user support, new system installation and integration efforts, and so on. We’re not clinicians by training. While we listen and learn a little every day about our clinical operations, we’re still not doctors or nurses. (Funny how that works.)

So what is informatics? What does an informaticist do? Dr. Gibson explains it like this (boldface mine):

Important informatics skills include change management (not just IT change management, but culture and process change management as well), business analysis, stakeholder engagement, project management, requirements development, strategic thinking to place projects into a larger vision, building for inter-operability, translating between IT & business, system life cycle, communications, [etc.]). A good informatician can speak the language of both IT staff and program staff, and should be a good communicator and group facilitator.

Informatics skills are not necessarily present in IT departments. A programmer may be very skilled in writing a program to do what he wants, but is rarely skilled in getting the thorough understanding of what users need. The database administrator may be very skilled in structuring a database to run very quickly, but usually does not understand the content well enough to create operational definitions that address what program managers want to know.

My recommendation from a couple years ago was that we needed to hire an informaticist, or at least someone who had clinical background and technical chops. With all the reporting and analysis requirements in UDS, Meaningful Use (MU), and Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH), not to mention workflow changes needed to meet increasing security and privacy requirements (HIPAA, HITECH) and general efficiency needs, having someone who could drive workflow / care / data change projects and communications would help a lot.

In the end we didn’t hire a classic informaticist, but we do have a high-level manager driving Quality Improvement (QI) efforts, PCMH, and MU, and she’s quite technically capable as well as a licensed provider. So we’re covering the need for now.

It’s possible that at our scale (currently around 130 employees), perhaps a full-blown highly-paid informaticist won’t be necessary in the future. It’s possible the EHR vendors and various governmental agencies will settle on a collection of core measurements and workflows that work for everyone and those features will just be built-in to our systems. (Ha! Sometimes I crack myself up…)

But for now, I would argue everyone in the health center space (50-500 employees) needs to be thinking about hiring an informaticist. Someone that has clinical training. Someone that isn’t afraid of computers and likes data and analysis. Someone that can communicate well and can drive change projects. So yeah… a miracle worker!

Meanwhile, everyone on your management team needs to know what informatics is. Your health center needs to get comfortable with data and change. Because “accountable care” demands proof, and the proof is in the data.

BONUS: Informatics Links

Digital media reaches a 'tipping point'

Digital media consumption has reached a tipping point; more average consumers are discovering all sorts of cool ways to get their media fix. And with radio’s final bastion – the car – quickly being penetrated by Internet radio and devices that make it easy to consume, traditional radio could have an uphill battle in 2011.

Bridge Ratings will soon publish its revenue projections for 2011 and the forecast is not as rosy as 2010.

2009 revenue was down 18%.

2010 traditional radio revenue will be up 4%.

2011 revenue will be down 2%.

via Navigate the Future

I just bought a new car stereo a few months ago. I can hook up an iPod or iPhone no problem. Or any kind of USB memory device with audio on it. HD Radio was an expensive add-on option. Satellite radio was as well (not to mention the subscription fee).

So far, wireless data plans for cars or other non-phone mobile use still relatively rare, expensive and don’t really travel all that well due to variable coverage.

But give it 5 years. I’ll buy a new media and data center for the car by then, I’m sure of it.

Cisco projecting explosive mobile data growth

found via gigaom.com

Explosive growth in mobile data is the norm in projections these days. I used a chart like this one in a presentation back in December.

It’s hard to imagine a 39X mobile data growth rate in just 5 years. But there it is.

Mobile Internet is the new PC revolution

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker presented a major collection of charts and notes about the economy and developments on the web at the Web 2.0 Summit this week. There are some mind-blowing numbers and observations about the “mobile Internet” in these charts.

MS Economy Internet Trends 102009 FINAL http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=21362476&access_key=key-1ri08xlqpnvlx69jzjcw&page=33&version=1&viewMode=slideshow

I remember when PCs arrived on the scene, when corporations started adopting those tools to empower individuals and small departments to get work done without having to wait for the slow-moving “Data Processing” departments. DP professionals hated these uncontrolled devices as they proliferated everywhere. The same thing happened when the Palm Pilot and other early PDAs arrived. Today, the PC and even corporate-owned mobile devices have largely been brought under control in larger companies (and it’s killing their transformational utility, by the way).

But the arrival of the mobile web into the pockets of millions of people worldwide is changing things in ways we don’t yet see. Check out the slides. Look at the astronomical growth rates of data consumption on the iPhone platform. The mobile web is how we must serve the public interest going forward. We don’t have to forget the standard PC and browser, but we have to meet the mobile needs of users in lots of new ways.

Check out the slides and consider the (near) future.

NOTE: Found via Google Reader’s new “Popular Items” feature.