It Was All About the Data at HIMSS13

The level of engagement and conversations about big data and analytics at HIMSS13 was very exciting and encouraging. After all, transformation of the healthcare system will not only be dependent on data, but more importantly about our ability to securely capture, integrate, manage and analyze it in order to extract insights and inform action.

Whether you’re trying to measure and act on population health by understanding how behavioral or environmental factors impact your patient population, or trying to engage consumers in their healthcare by providing easy, mobile apps that help them track and measure their own progress, you will need to have comprehensive, high-quality data at the foundation to enable these and other innovative initiatives.

Paraphrasing from Gartner’s Vi Shaffer, who said it very clearly, to make sense of the volume of data in healthcare you need at the foundation the ability to integrate, manage and govern your data. The growth in big data and the ability to tap into new types of data only exacerbates the challenge for healthcare providers and payers. In order to connect the clinical practice with fundamental science, we need the IT infrastructure to pull it all together so that we can make good sense of it.

I couldn’t agree more, and IBM offers the most comprehensive and extensible information management platform to help healthcare organizations progress their analytics from basic, to advanced, to prescriptive.

During the conference, IBM hosted a health analytics luncheon for approximately 75 healthcare clients and business partners. The topic centered around our latest white paper on what it means to be a data driven organization and why it’s so important in today’s changing healthcare market. The room was packed. We were very fortunate to have Mr. J.D. Whitlock from Catholic Health Partners share his story about how enterprise health analytics will impact CHP’s ability to understand their patient population and put into place new programs that will help improve quality of care and outcomes.

Last, but certainly not least was Eric Topol’s keynote on Tuesday. It is truly amazing the level of business development in the mobile health applications market, from helping people track and measure their own health status from their personal devices, to enabling doctors to administer complex tests like ECG’s using a handheld device! The potential for consumer engagement, improved outcomes and cost savings is extraordinary, not to mention the exciting possibilities for personalized medicine through the exploding market of “omics analytics” – including genomics (the study of gene sequences), “proteomics” (the study of the structure and functioning of proteins), “metabolomics” (study of chemical process in metabolism).

It’s a great time to be in healthcare, and it’s a great time to engage with a company like IBM that is investing millions of dollars into technology, services and people to truly make a difference with smarter healthcare.  If you’re interested in learning more about what IBM is doing with analytics and big data in healthcare, visit www.IBM.com/Big-Data/Healthcare or follow us on Twitter @IBMBigDataHLS.

Download the white paper: Data-driven healthcare organizations use big data analytics for big gains