Dan Exley discussed the impact of big data on health care.

Demand for analytical talent could be 50% to 60% greater than the projected supply by 2018, and health care analytics will likely power the next revolution in American health services and sciences, improving patient outcomes and ensuring accurate diagnoses. Dan Exley and Scott Raymond of Memorial Care discussed the impact of analytics in their six-hospital network at the recent Health Care Analytics Seminar.

The advent of big data in the last decade has revolutionized industries across the economy. But perhaps no other field stands to gain as much from this transformation as health care. The accurate and accessible reporting, archiving and retrieval of data can assist practitioners in making prompt and accurate diagnoses, select the most effective medications and identify individual health risks.

There is currently an estimated $300 billion annual potential value to U.S. health care big data and demand for analytical talent could be 50% to 60% greater than the projected supply by 2018.

Memorial Care Executive Director of Data Strategy and Reporting Dan Exley and Executive Director of Information Services Scott Raymond discussed the impact of analytics on their network of six Southern California hospitals at the Health Care Analytics Seminar on Nov. 6.

Raymond discussed an app, developed by PerfectServe, which is improving accuracy and efficiency in network hospitals. The app improves communication between nurses and physicians by permitting doctors to decide how they wish to be contacted, establishing a single platform for secure messaging, enabling advanced call routing and permitting users to list and edit their schedules on demand.

Scott Raymond discussed the improved care as a result of the efficiencies permitted by health care analytics in the Memorial care system.

“The average communication time between nurses and physicians was 45 minutes but is now an average of 14 minutes, a figure that is likely to go down further with greater adoption,” Raymond said. This figure is crucial in emergencies or to alleviate patient pain or discomfort.

Raymond noted the evolution of PCs in the health care industry. “Two decades ago, PCs were on a green screen system, in which everything was connected to a main computer,” he said. “Today, we’re going back to housing desktops as a virtual machine in the data center.”

Utilizing Aventura Roaming Aware Desktop, Memorial Care is making patient care more efficient by eliminating many time-consuming logins for information queries. Nurses care for an average of four patients simultaneously, and Aventura’s rapid login is saving 25 minutes for each nurse shift. Similar studies with physicians show that as much as one hour could be saved each day using Dragon systems.

Exley noted that while health care data might seem daunting, it is manageable with today’s technology. “Anything that you see on the web has a massive back end behind it,” he said. Memorial Care’s total data has increased 75 times since 2008. “Yet our data sets are infinitesimal compared to big technology companies like Google and Facebook.”

Part of the challenge with health care analytics is that structured data, such as age, weight or height, while invaluable, only accounts for a fraction of the information a clinician seeks. Upwards of 75% of relevant data is unstructured data, such as descriptions of health conditions or patient symptoms.

“Most of the time, we’re spending time understanding the data we’re working on,” Exley said.

Mihaylo’s ISDS Department has partnered with the CSUF Department of Health Sciences and with professionals in the community to create a Healthcare Information Technology certificate program, which will debut in January 2016. The four-course program will be open to all CSUF students and units will count toward Mihaylo graduate programs.

For more information, visit Mihaylo ISDS at SGMH 4113 or online.