Baptist Health Sees Big Payoff Using Predictive Analytics
Healthcare Finance News (HFN) has reported that Montgomery, Ala.’s Baptist Health is utilizing predictive analytics technology to determine patterns in datasets and help providers make better treatment decisions. According to HFN, the predictive analytics algorithm at Baptist Health can notify medical professionals in real time with crucial information about a patient, such as the likelihood of complications or exacerbation of a past issue, which also saves money by preventing readmissions and unnecessary treatments. Though Baptist Health has benefitted from the technology, the cost of implementation as well as natural aversion to change have made adopting predictive analytics a slow process for many other providers.
State of Health Care: Methodist Physician Mining Life-Saving Data
Methodist Healthcare’s Specialty and Transplant Hospital in San Antonio, Texas is now home to one of the largest live donor kidney transplant programs in the country, thanks to one innovative physician. According to the San Antonio Business Journal, Dr. Adam Bingaman found the donor selection process to be frustrating, as even a national registry list often failed to turn up a match. To improve this issue, Bingaman recently developed a new method of data analysis that increases the odds of finding a donor match. Bingaman will present this method at The Health Cell’s 2015 State of the Industry event.
Catholic Health Initiatives Feels Pinch of Expensive Integration Strategy
Catholic Health Initiatives, the third largest faith-based health system in the U.S., has implemented initiatives that will provide clinically integrated networks resulting in higher quality care and insurance options for patients. Healthcare Finance News reports this will enable CHI to “treat its patients across a broad spectrum of care,” but the cost is becoming an issue for the organization. CHI lost $641 million in the 2014 fiscal year and is set to reduce the 90,500 individuals it employs by 1.7 percent in 2015. Healthcare Finance writes that CHI’s 2020 vision statement aims to provide increased levels of patient care while also “moving beyond its focus on the hospital.”
2015 Could Be the Year of the Hospital Hack
While credit card hacking has declined in popularity in recent years, the theft of electronic health information is on the rise, increasing by 600 percent in 10 months last year, according to a recent article in Technology Review. The expanding presence of electronic medical records, while beneficial to providers and patients, can come at the expense of security if safeguards are not made a priority. These records include both personal and financial information — almost enough to replicate a complete person, Technology Review reports — which makes them an even larger target for hackers.
