Data Mining

Recently, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) announced they are teaming up to improve data collection in electronic health records (EHRs) through a set of standardized data elements and definitions for the clinical management of patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and coronary artery disease (CAD).

The Mayo Clinic, the Rochester, Minn.-based globally known non-profit medical group practice and research organization, has announced a partnership with health IT vendor, Optum (Cambridge, Mass.), to develop a collaborative research and development facility. The facility will combine the two organization’s experience, assets, technologies, and expertise as well as recourse from other healthcare, science, and academic organizations/institutions, to focus on better care for patients.

Kenneth Bertka, M.D. has been helping to lead his colleagues at Mercy Health Partners, and its parent health system, Catholic Health Partners, forward on data-driven population health management. A key lesson learned? Take everything one step at a time.

Across the country, IT leaders of hospitals and health systems are recognizing the importance of integration in the new healthcare environment. This means investments into open architecture, HIE, and other technologies that are helping bring disparate systems, and disparate elements of the care continuum, in a unified, seamless environment.

Rapid improvements in technology, semantic data structures, informatics professional collaboration and sequencing technologies are not necessarily the only gaps needed for the realization of personalized medicine (improving genomic and phenotypic data integration) but these must be taken into account on how best to exploit the opportunities to facilitate personalized medicine.