Clinical and Business Intelligence is beginning to take shape in health care. Imagine, the largest sector of our American economy has not been using data to inform the business case until just recently.
Maybe more interesting is the use of our personally identified health information for clinical and business intelligence. Face-value there is a lot of good in this path. However, under the surface health care organizations, large insurance payers and government programs are benefiting from the use of your PHI.
Take any chronic condition. You may not be ill today, but with predictive models we can forecast with good accuracy which diseases, conditions and health problems you are at risk of contracting over the length of your life based on factors like familial predisposition, pre-existing conditions, genetics, lab tests, histrionics and social determinants of health. So identifying those individuals at higher risk of utilizing more health care resources and predicting their outcomes is 'a thing'. In fact today's risk models do a pretty good job of identifying, stratifying and capturing individuals with high health risks.
Why is this important? New measurement models developed by the federal government are doing the same thing - but under the title of 'quality improvement' and 'population health'. Other buzz words are 'improved care' or 'optimized health' or 'realized value' and in some cases 'health outcomes'.
Measurement ensures that the national health care system transforms into a mechanism that predicts with some accuracy health outcomes that prove to be valuable to the larger public good. To get there, PHI must be used to create large data sets that support practice and research.
So what's in it for the consumer?