The Health Data Analytics Hype Cycle

The Health Data Analytics Hype Cycle

ahier.net – At the recent Healthcare Think Tank, At the Crossroads: Technology and Transformation in Healthcare, sponsored by Dell, we had some very interesting discussions on a wide variety of topics. I will be highlighting some of the topics we covered in a few posts over the next couple months. At the first Think Tank three years ago at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas I said that “Big data is the next big thing in healthcare.” One of the hot topics discussed at this years Think Tank springing out of the HIMSS conference was health data analytics. I have also said that data analytics is the third wave of health IT which we’re undergoing, after data capture and data sharing. It is this component – having robust analytics capabilities – that will provide the return on investment for the massive amount of government and private sector spending on health IT in the past few years. During the session where we discussed data analytics Dan Munro, a contributor at Forbes, brought up the distinction between predictive analytics, proscriptive analytics, and persuasive analytics. Moving quickly past predictive analytics, which everyone seems to be working on, and into proscriptive analytics where actionable information is obtained and used. But sometimes the jargon we use can stand in the way when terms like “big data” and “analytics” become buzz words and lose some of their effectiveness. Even…