Health care innovation - Achieving quality transformations in health care with analytics technology

By Mikael Hagstrom

In the aftermath of the economic crisis, our health care systems are faced with many challenges arising from aging populations, higher patient expectations, inefficient management of systems, increasing complexities in payment systems and – in many cases – fraud and abuse.

This is not just a problem for the health care industry and the public sector. Problems in the health care system affect every industry. After all, our businesses and economies depend on the standing health of our work forces. From a business perspective, there is also significant concern about the challenges and constraints that health care systems face today, including the rise of non-wage labor costs and public sector budget cuts for health care in many countries around the world.

Since both the public and private sectors will benefit from an improved health care system, governments and businesses need to work closely together to maximize limited resources while improving quality of health care and patient outcomes.

We cannot ensure a long-term, sustainable vision for our health care systems without investments in innovative health technologies that power our health care systems – particularly those systems that focus on improving the quality of health and the quality of the health care system itself. In this article, I will:

1. Reflect on what it takes to measure quality versus what defines quality measures.
2. Share some considerations on how I believe sustainable quality transformations can be achieved in today's health care systems through innovation.

Measuring quality versus quality measures
From a business perspective, it is important to understand the action of measuring quality. But how do we decide what core factors determine the quality of our health care? The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has been making great strides to provide a basis for defining health indicators that determine the quality of care that OECD countries can refer to as a standard. This is essential for the evaluation and comparison with other countries, so we can learn and absorb some of the successes taking place around the world.

But establishing these quality indicators also calls for more structured health information systems and an effective use of data to ensure the interpretations are not just "indicators" but true measures of quality. Advances in the medical field and ongoing research also contribute data, and can offer more complex data to help us measure more than patient records.

Additional data complexities will come from fragmentation in the delivery of health care with data in scattered areas. Therefore, creating data linkage from different sources of data, such as hospital records or government administrative records, will be necessary to provide a more complete picture of health in various populations and to yield more meaningful insight.

Additional and more accurate data sources will help bring value in efforts to compare health care quality measures internationally. These comparisons should not just be on cost and utilization of care and health statuses like death rates and life expectancy, but more for providing benchmarks to analyze and compare why one country has a different level of quality.

Sustainable quality transformations through innovation 
Innovations in promoting quality of care are not just about technology; they also involve interventions in the way health care systems are managed and medicine is delivered today.

We can look to the National Health Service (NHS) Information Centre in the United Kingdom as an example. The NHS recently used analytics to allocate limited resources more efficiently across the entire health care delivery chain, and to create greater transparency by integrating, managing and analyzing information all across the NHS. This effort is part of the UK government's announcement to achieve an "information revolution." Most importantly, the NHS project goes beyond simple reporting to provide accurate insights about the business performance to help administrators and physicians make predictive and preventative medicine a central focus.

Another example is the innovative use of Unique Patient Identifiers (UPIs) to improve quality of care. UPIs improve data linkages, and the European Nordic countries have been able to track patients across health care settings using these data points. This has been a huge innovative success in helping to identify the readmission of patients to hospitals and, through the use of analytics, to also understand more about the when, where and why behind the readmission.

SAS is also very closely following the first patient safety strategy in Finland as announced in January 2009, and we fully support its objective of systematically integrating patient safety within the Finnish health care system.

Likewise, Australia has passed legislation in mid-2010 to establish a unique health identifier for every Australian, though issues surrounding the legislation are delaying the initiative. Since the Australian Department for Health and Ageing (DoHA) uses SAS' advanced analytics to make well-informed and fact based decisions with collected data, we have been following closely the efforts to implement the new National eHealth Strategy initiative in Australia. Our experience in other countries tells us that a more integrated approach and implementation strategy is necessary to reap the benefits of e-health programs.

I see quality improvements and measurements going hand-in-hand. The sustainability of health care systems that we are all striving to attain must go hand-in-hand with innovation. Health systems need accurate information to run their business so they can understand where they are doing well and where they need to improve.

Bio:  Mikael Hagstrom is the Executive Vice President of SAS Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific. Hagstrom is passionate about providing a culture where innovation can flourish, resulting in market leadership both for the organization and its customers.

Mikael Hagstrom, Executive Vice President of SAS Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific