Healthcare Analytics and Interoperability – 2023 Health IT Predictions

As we head into 2023, we wanted to kick off the new year with a series of 2023 Health IT predictions.  We asked the Healthcare IT Today community to submit their predictions and we received a wide ranging set of responses that we grouped into a number of themes.  Check out our communities predictions below and be sure to add your own thoughts and/or places you disagree with these predictions in the comments and on social media.

All of this year’s 2023 health IT predictions:

And now, check out our community’s healthcare analytics and interoperability predictions.

Jean Drouin, Co-Founder and CEO at Clarify Health
Big data platforms go mainstream. Move over Epic, Tableau and Alteryx. Make way for enterprise platforms purposely built to deliver on-demand patient journey insights. The on-demand, self-service approach to analytics, more commonly associated with the financial services industry and its Bloomberg terminal, will become broadly accessible to hospitals, payers, and life sciences companies. This will usher a move away from site-based systems of record (e.g., Epic) to real-time patient journey optimization systems that are EMR-agnostic and fueled by far more comprehensive data than what sits in EMRs today.

Gary Hagmueller, CEO at Arcion
Real-time Data Drives Better Healthcare Workers & Patient Experience — Hands down, the trend for healthcare organizations toward real-time data-driven use cases is accelerating faster than any other notable trend today.

What does this mean? It means taking data as close to when it is created and using it to create value through actions as close to the creation of the data as possible.

As to creation, transactional databases in healthcare are one of most common sources of data creation. Patient records, hospital records, exam reports and the movement of information are all tracked by such systems. However, since these systems represent the single source of truth, they are deliberately difficult to access for security, performance and cost reasons. This presents a key challenge to CIOs and data leaders at healthcare provider and payer organizations: Access to this valuable data and making it actionable without inserting risk.

Ben Herzberg, Chief Scientist at Satori
Healthcare providers will be facing IT pressures: how to enable more people to make use of more sensitive data in a secure and compliant way, while also being economically efficient. Those who will manage to increase data use in a safe way will accelerate innovation.

Rob Cohen, CEO at Bamboo Health
We Should Expect an Increased Interest in Making Healthcare Data Truly Actionable: There’s no denying that offering access to timely and accurate information, insights and analytics enables healthcare professionals to view and treat the whole person for better value-based care delivery. This is why I can’t think of a more important focus in today’s fragmented healthcare ecosystem than making data more understandable and relevant. I predict that in 2023, we will see a transition from simply sharing raw data between healthcare providers towards an increased emphasis on turning that data into actionable insights. Providing intelligence at the point of care holds the promise of not only supporting clinical decision making, but of lessening administrative burden and improving health outcomes across care settings.

Fixing a Broken Behavioral Health System Will Remain a Critical Focus in 2023: The current approach to behavioral health crisis management remains piecemeal in many communities. Even though initiatives such as the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline – the behavioral health lifeline akin to 911 – demonstrate the renewed focus on behavioral health from communities and the government, far too many at-risk individuals fall through the cracks because of incomplete, outdated encounters, referrals and prescription data. This, when combined with a lack of care coordination between providers, leads to higher costly emergency department utilization, longer inpatient stays, more readmissions, increases in ED boarding and more.

In 2023 and beyond, I predict that we will see a continued commitment to improving behavioral health care coordination. By bridging the gap between behavioral health and physical health to deliver whole person care, we can facilitate better patient outcomes and more efficient uses of healthcare resources. The cost of not doing so is far too great for communities, families and the broader public.

Tim Kostner, Chief Revenue Officer at XSOLIS
In 2023 we will continue to see a push to realize value in healthcare through the use of data and automation. Specifically, the increasing awareness of the fragmentation that exists across the traditional payer/provider model, will result in initiatives that foster a more collaborative approach. In addition to more robust clinical data-sharing, we will see early examples of how advanced automation and AI models can be leveraged to create efficiencies and a more coordinated, patient-centric model. Simply, given the workforce, capacity and economic challenges faced, the environment is ripe for disruption.

Thomas Naughton, President, U.S. Federal Citizen Services at Maximus
Leveraging technology to modernize, digitize, connect, and consolidate data will prove critical to the nation’s ability to address major public health needs both present and future, including preparing for the next global health crisis. The extent to which we prioritize data modernization will have a profound impact on efforts to collect vital information about — and provide critical services for — the nation’s most vulnerable populations.

Tom Knight, Founder & CEO at Invistics
In 2022, we saw record numbers of drug overdose deaths driven largely by illicitly manufactured fentanyl—but heading into 2023, healthcare organizations need to reduce drug diversion occurring in their own facilities. To protect their workforce, and their patients, healthcare leaders must do more to ensure their staff is properly trained on the signs of substance use and invest in machine learning analytics to make it easier to detect drug diversion within their organization. The best tools pull data from multiple IT systems (like electronic health records and automated medication dispensing cabinets) to detect patterns and behaviors associated with drug diversion—enabling organizations to intervene before serious incidents occur.

Rebecca Sutphen, MD, FACMGG, Chief Medical Officer at InformedDNA
Although researchers have long focused on the use of genomic testing to refine treatment for specific, rare conditions, research findings are beginning to unlock genomic testing’s benefits for a wider population. As providers become more familiar with different tests and how to use them in routine practice, more and more patients understand the value of these tests in identifying and managing a variety of conditions across different specialties.

As the demand for genomic testing grows and meets the needs of the general population, health plans will need to revisit their coverage benefits in the coming year to meet member, provider, and employer group expectations. These entities will increasingly press for health plans to have a robust, responsive, and consistent approach to covering genomic testing, as well as the clinical interventions indicated based on testing results.

Elizabeth A. Delahoussaye, Chief Privacy Officer at Ciox
In 2023, health IT vendors will continue to work to maintain compliance as part of new regulatory requirements related to the 21st Century Cures Act. Health IT developers and health information networks and exchanges are now subject to penalties of up to $1 million per violation should they interfere with the exchange of electronic health information.

Additionally, as the volume of data steadily rises, there will continue to be new data requests that must be managed. The complexity of requests will increase as patients now have a right to access anything and everything that is used as part of their patient care. As our healthcare system continues to transition to patient-centered care, the enablement of unprecedented access to information by patients is a critical, but complex next step. This data availability demands ongoing collaboration and transparency between providers and health IT vendors to avoid any actions that could be deemed as information blocking.

Over the next year, those developers who remain well connected to the evolving nature of healthcare’s information access environment—and the healthcare providers that supply data—will be prepared to meet the challenges of information blocking’s next chapter.

Ashley Basile, Chief Product Officer at Diameter Health (now part of Availity)
The interoperability community has been waiting for the updated Prior Authorization proposal after the late 2020 proposal was withdrawn due to concerns about costs and deadlines. The updated proposal was finally released on December 6, 2022. The CMS proposed ruling requires impacted payers to build and maintain a FHIR API, starting January 1st, 2026, in effort to improve the cumbersome and costly prior authorization process. This will further endeavor to cement FHIR as the data standard to support future information exchange.

However, in 2023, organizations will increasingly realize that standardizing on the FHIR format is just one part of the equation. FHIR offers many benefits, but it doesn’t solve the challenge of deriving value from legacy clinical data that is fraught with inconsistencies in data collection and coding variations. If clinical data quality issues are not addressed as organizations seek to implement FHIR APIs and begin leveraging FHIR at scale, the very goal of the CMS proposal in streamlining and automating processes like prior authorization will fail.

Andy Palmer, CEO and Co-Founder at Tamr
As we head into 2023, organizations will reach a tipping point. It’s no longer possible to rely on traditional, rules-based data management processes that handle enterprise master patient index (EMPI) or healthcare provider identity resolutions. These solutions simply don’t scale. Instead, businesses need to embrace AI/ML to automate the mastering of data across the organization so they can break down data silos and deliver clean, accurate data for decision-making and efficient operations.

There is a great need in the medical world for solutions that can dramatically increase the quality of patient data in order to both improve care and reduce costs. Embracing AI and machine learning will enable healthcare organizations to resolve data and data entities at scale and with speed. And because machines don’t get tired, they can do this effectively as data volumes continue to grow rapidly.

David Navarro, Senior Director of Data Science at Harmony Healthcare IT
In 2023 I expect the HIT Industry will solidify a strategy and discipline as it relates to historical and archived health data. The Information Blocking provision of the 21st Century Cure’s act has been the catalyst for making all electronic health information available to patients, which includes data stored in archives.

The accessibility of this archived data will be driven through the adoption of the HL7 FHIR specification. As the FHIR specification matures, there will likely be several additions to the existing FHIR implementation guides focused specifically focused on the delivery of data directly to patients.

Clay Ritchey, CEO at Verato
Critical to nearly all health IT projects in 2023 is “knowing who is who” in your patient database and being able to quickly and reliably access crucial identity information. Identity is foundational to innovation and healthcare strategy. A recent survey found that 60% of health leaders consider patient identity to be valuable to every function and initiative within their organization, including improving care quality and the patient experience.

In the coming year, many hospitals and health systems will evaluate how to generate and maintain a robust 360° view of patients and master critical domains such as consumer, provider and employee identity. In fact, a recent study found that 49% of healthcare organizations plan to implement a new process or solution to address identity management in the next 12 months. That will require a good bit of work, given that today’s hospitals are using a vast array of homegrown systems, including EHRs, generic applications, Enterprise Master Patient Indexes (EMPIs), generic Master Data Management (MDM) schemes, and other identity solutions designed to organize and stitch together data. These healthcare providers should consider an hMDM, a next generation Master Data Management solution designed specifically for healthcare organizations across the care continuum.

Be sure to check out all of Healthcare IT Today’s healthcare analytics and interoperability content and all of our other 2023 healthcare IT predictions.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Hi John, interesting predictions on Interop for 2023. Specifically because not a mention of TEFCA which is underway now to set the floor for the interop. One would expect all predictions to center around TEFCA adoption. Instead, these are the “Kodak” incumbents talking about future of the “film-based cameras” while digital cameras are being shipped.

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