Industry observers agree: the leveraging of data analytics is in an early and frankly, rather challenging, phase in U.S. healthcare. The leaders of patient care organizations that are plunging into the development of accountable care organizations (ACOs), other risk-based types of contracting, and every form of population health and care management, are beginning to work through myriad obstacles to try to achieve success.
And success in such contracting and population-based work inevitably requires excellent data analytics. But, as patient care leaders are learning, marrying clinical data, including from electronic records (EHRs), with claims-based data, is turning out to be far more complex and challenging than many imagined.
