The New Bottom Line: Data
For hospitals and medical groups, data is the new bottom line, according to a report from AHIMA.
CMS will begin its value-based purchasing initiative in October 2012. This is just one step in the long march healthcare is taking from claims-based reimbursement to pay based on quality measurement. The targets for delivering quality care are almost entirely based on data.
The AHIMA report, available here, notes that “the more accurate and managed a facility’s data, the better their reimbursement potential.” This assumes the hospital is hitting the targets for high-quality care.If you’re facility is providing poor care and patients are dying right and left, high quality data reporting is not going to be in your best interest (at least for Medicare payments).
According to one AHIMA executive,
“People are going to have to leverage the data and use what they have available. That is what’s going to make the difference between success and failure.”
The report says that as senior executives at hospitals start analyzing data, they will learn something AHIMA has been warning about for years, that data integrity “isn’t what it should be.”
For example, integrating information from different facilities raises information management challenges when multiple terms are used for the same items.
The AHIMA report cites this example
“A hospital has a psychology division that participates in an ACO. The division sends a record named ‘treatment plan’ to another facility, which assumes it is a general health treatment plan and fails to provide the record with the advanced security that behavioral health records require.”
The report adds that because of these issues
“work will be done to leverage metadata tags to manage patient identity, patient privacy and security, and health data provenance.”
Editorial note: data is a plural noun and normally takes plural verbs. However, when a unit of data is referred to (” the data is sound”) it becomes a collective noun and takes a singular verb.
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