Healthcare organizations have large amounts of data but often do not have the tools to bring the data together for useful business information and planning. Healthcare analytics is the systematic use of data and related business insights developed through applied analytical disciplines such as, statistical, contextual, quantitative, predictive, cognitive, other including emerging model to drive fact-based decision making for planning, management, measurement and learning. Analytics may be descriptive, predictive or prescriptive.

GNS Healthcare today announced that U.S. Patent 8,571,803, entitled "Systems and Methods for Modeling and Analyzing Networks," has been issued, relating to significant innovations in automated causal data analytics.  The patent covers key methods underlying REFS(TM), a computational platform that automatically builds predictive and explanatory models from big data.

CHICAGO—The ultimate vision of the Meaningful Use program is to create significant and measurable improvements in population health through a transformed healthcare delivery system, said George Hripcsak, MD, MS, chair of the department of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. Hripcsak spoke during the Healthcare Leadership Forum on Nov. 15.

CHICAGO—Adverse events in hospitals may be ten times greater than previously measured, according to research conducted by David C. Classen, MD, MS, CMIO of Pascal Metrics and assistant professor of the department of medicine at the University of Utah, who spoke during the Healthcare Leadership Forum on Nov. 14.

The DELTA Powered Analytics Assessment, the first healthcare-industry benchmark designed to measure and score analytical maturity, was launched by HIMSS Analytics and The International Institute for Analytics.

CHICAGO—As a Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston created registries and repositories to help with its quality measurements, said John D. Halamka, MD, CIO, speaking during the Healthcare Leadership Forum on Nov. 15.

CHICAGO—Personalized medicine may bring clinicians at odds with evidence-based medicine, said Howard C. Bauchner, MD, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, speaking at the Healthcare Leadership Forum. Healthcare is working on “reconciling patient preference with evidence-based medicine,” he said.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy launched an international collaboration as part of its efforts to create large, cloud-based open health data repositories.