Tips for using data to improve your hospital operations.

The use of data can be a very powerful thing, especially in a hospital setting. Surprisingly we’re not talking about health record data, but rather Service Desk data. With the increased use of healthcare technologies, the demand for Service Desk support is rapidly growing.

This week, we published a guide that provides recommendations on the use of data to optimize and improve your hospital Service Desk operations. We believe that a data-driven Service Desk can create a more productive work environment for both IT service providers and their customers throughout the hospital. If you want to learn how to implement data collection and analysis strategies into your Service Desk, download the guide, “Data Driven Service Desk”.

Some healthcare data is too computationally intensive for health IT.

In more data-related news, it appears that health IT isn’t keeping up with the amount of patient data being produced. Healthcare IT News illustrated this in a recent article with an example of the volume of data created for cancer patients and the challenges that poses. According to Joe Gray, associate director for translational research at the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health & Science University, one tumor requires 100 GBs of data. With 14 million cancer patients per year, that results in a significant amount of data that the technology is unable to keep up with.

ICD-10 implementation costs are three times more than original estimates.

The American Medical Association (AMA) published research this week that challenges original ICD-10 cost predictions. It appears that at this point, the implementation of ICD-10 is significantly more expensive than many originally thought. This applies to small, medium, and large practices. The AMA performed analysis and published their new estimated costs, compared to predictions published by Nachimson Advisors in 2008. Below is a table illustrating the difference in expected costs.

Given the results of the research, AMA Executive Vice President & CEO, James Madara sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services requesting that they reconsider the mandate for ICD-10.

UK also experiencing slow downs in healthcare technology changes due to cost.

Apparently, because of costs, hospitals in the UK have been slow to adopt electronic health records. Challenges that UK healthcare providers are facing, related to the move to EHRs are detailed in a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

The main challenges they cite are:

• Infrastructure
• Personnel
• Facilities
• Other (such as training)

The study suggests that improved communications and set expectations will help hospitals in their transition.