I was just thinking about all of these analytics vendors and healthcare analytics stories that were sent to me during HIMSS. Every story goes a bit like this. We gathered a whole bunch of data. We analyzed the data. We discovered that we sucked and so we were able to save ,,X” million dollars and improve the quality of care we provide. Makes for a great story no?
I was thinking about this and I was trying to figure out why this story never ends differently. Every analytics implementation I’ve ever seen or heard about finds some major problems in ever healthcare organization. How come they don’t sometimes do the analysis and discover: “Wow! You’re organization is awesome. You shouldn’t change anything!”
I have two theories about why this is the case. First, no healthcare system is perfectly optimized. That means that if you look hard enough, you can always find something that can be improved. There certainly are different degrees of improvement that can be provided depending on the health system’s baseline, but there are always ways that it can be improved.
