Analytics is top priority in healthcare IT

A recent survey of chief information officers and other top-level healthcare IT executives who are members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), reveals that data analytics tops the list for IT infrastructure spending.

Given the trend toward "value-based care," which rewards providers for delivering better and more efficient healthcare, the need is growing for effective mining of clinical and financial data.

According to the survey conducted by Salt Lake City-based Health Catalyst, 54 percent of respondents rated analytics as their highest IT priority, followed by 42 percent for population health initiatives and 30 percent for the shift to the ICD-10 coding system.

In addition, most respondents (90 percent) said analytics will be "extremely important" or "very important" to their organization in the next one to three years.

Interestingly, the survey also revealed that a lack of analytics expertise and resources were the biggest obstacles to the adoption of analytics technology.

“CHIME members serve in the front lines of a healthcare industry confronted by the most significant challenges in its history, and their focus on analytics as a key solution to those challenges is confirmation of the technology’s importance,” said Dan Burton, CEO of Health Catalyst in a press release. “In fact, analytics is a prerequisite for all of the major initiatives currently underway to address value-based care. Once organizations have all of their data warehoused and accessible, analytics is the core tool to help them make sense of the data and put it to work.”