Community health

Small facilities face a variety of challenges in providing care to rural residents; the use technology is just one of the strategies that can keep them open.

Commentary: An effort to organize four health systems into one Accountable Care Organization collaborative used advanced tools and analytics to stratify populations, track outcomes and improve care coordination. But initial efforts also exemplified the historical divide between the physical and behavioral healthcare delivery systems, which can result in siloed and suboptimal care.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System, like many large health organizations, has poured enormous resources into building an enterprisewide data infrastructure. With the foundation in place, the health system known as Penn Medicine is embarking on a big data project to expand its information horizons and develop predictive analytics to diagnose deadly illnesses before they occur.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services continued its transparency initiative as 2015 ended, releasing files with data covering home health agency performance in 2013. Who will use it, and will it provide value to the industry?

While population health management initiatives are becoming more popular, many healthcare organizations are undertaking these efforts on their own without a population health vendor-provided IT solution, according to HIMSS Analytics.

In 2016, accountable care organizations are expected to increase the use of telemedicine technologies as a way to improve patient care quality and achieve greater cost savings,

Changing the way healthcare organizations manage patients with chronic diseases is one of the major challenges to improving outcomes while controlling costs. Technology used in the home can have a dramatic impact on the results.

The healthcare industry is among the most aggressive when it comes to issues related to data collection, access, and privacy, but one clinical data expert believes that the future of health data management lies in turning data ownership over to patients.