Guest post Michelle Blackmer, director of marketing, Healthcare, Informatica.
The Affordable Care Act is commonly surrounded by words, such as “analytics,” “electronic medical record (EMR)” and “population health,” routinely trumping the word that matters the most, the center and driver of the law: the “patient.”
A recent EMR Patient Impact Survey compiled by Aeffect, Inc. & 88 Brand Partners, illustrates that patients are experiencing a personal benefit of EMR adoption:
82 percent of patients visiting doctors that use an EMR believe they are receiving better care,
68 percent appreciate the convenience of being able to check for medical records and test results, and
44 percent, or almost half, of these respondents say they have a more positive impression of their doctor because he/she uses an EMR.
However, beyond these early and obvious benefits offered by information technology – convenience and improved service – there are more meaningful benefits ahead. Insights will be revealed that will change healthcare in ways we can’t even imagine. The adoption of EMRs is generating useful, consumable and sharable electronic data. It is also creating a forum to inspire and collect patient-generated data, including health history, symptoms, biometric data, treatment history and lifestyle choices.
According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there are now an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm, and this volume is rapidly increasing. In fact, many Informatica healthcare customers have reported significant data volume growth. For example, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center recently communicated that its data storage (storage alone) is growing at 40 percent a year.
Informatica Corporation, the world’s number one independent provider of data integration software, today announced the availability of a new research report by the Ponemon Institute LLC, entitled, The State of Data Centric Security. Based on a global survey of more than 1,500 IT and IT security professionals, the study reveals how organizations understand and respond to data security threats in today’s information-everywhere world.
According to the study:
Not knowing the location of sensitive or private data is the foremost concern of today’s IT security practitioners, topping hacker attacks, malicious employees and concerns around compliance.
Organizations are in the dark regarding sensitive data, withonly 16 percent knowing where all their sensitive structured data resides, and a miniscule seven percent knowing the location of all sensitive unstructured data, including data in emails and documents.
Automated sensitive data-discovery tools would reduce risk and increase security effectiveness. The vast majority of respondents (nearly 75 percent) believe their security activities would benefit from an automated solution for discovering the locations and relationships of sensitive and private data. However, only 40 percent of organizations use an automated solution, and only 22 percent of those use it to discover sensitive data in emails and files.
Key Survey Findings
With today’s escalating threat landscape and with sensitive and private data no longer restricted to traditional enterprise boundaries, it is imperative to know data location and proliferation to protect it adequately. According to the Informatica-sponsored Ponemon study:
57 percent of respondents say not knowing where sensitive data resides keeps them up at night, followed by those who say migration to new mobile platforms (51 percent), temporary worker or contractor mistakes (50 percent) and outsourcer management of data (42 percent) are top sleep-robbing concerns.
24 percent do not know where their organization’s sensitive structured data resides, and an additional 60 percent have only limited knowledge.
41 percent do not know where their sensitive unstructured data resides, and an additional 52 percent have only limited knowledge.
Current security solutions often do not provide visibility into data location and user access, while existing data protection procedures are most often poorly conducted.
Guest post by Michelle Blackmer, director of marketing, healthcare, Informatica.
Several weeks into the New Year, our fitness resolutions are still top of mind. Whether tracking calories or steps, we are asking ourselves questions like “how many pounds have I lost?”, “how many calories did I eat?” and “how many steps did I take?” To take the guesswork out of it and to hold ourselves accountable, many of us put a Fitbit, Nike Fuel or Jawbone on our wish lists. Our physical fitness has become data-driven; these devices create data that provide insight, enable us to visualize patterns and generate millions of bytes of data, which helps account for the anticipated annual 40 percent growth in big data. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg for data-driven healthcare.
Health information leaders must continue to assess their business resolutions and take stock of their healthcare data fitness. This is especially important since an alarming 40 percent of healthcare executives gave their organizations a grade of “D” or “F” on their preparedness to manage the data deluge. What’s more is that none felt their organization deserved an “A.”
Successful transformation to value-driven care requires an investment in enterprise information management. However, healthcare organizations are tightening their belts and bracing for the hit to their bottom lines in response to the health reform law that took effect on January 1, 2014. Instead of scaling back, healthcare organizations must invest in the fitness of their data. After all, if the wrong data is analyzed (i.e., inaccurate, incomplete, missing or even unnecessary), organizations are going to make the wrong decisions. What is the cost of making the wrong decision?
Assess your data fitness. Ask yourself the following questions:
Guest post by Michelle Blackmer, director of marketing, Healthcare, Informatica.
The volume of protected health information (PHI) in electronic form is exploding – both from the wholesale move from paper charts to electronic health records for capturing clinical data and with the proliferation of new sources of electronic data from networked medical devices. Additionally, IT staff have been overwhelmed by regulatory mandates, rampant technology changes (e.g., virtualization, BYOD, big data), massive application projects and flat or decreasing budgets.
This increase in electronic PHI combined with the challenges for health systems IT make it even more important for providers and non-providers to find efficient ways to secure their data. However, with malicious activity showing a consistent upward trend, absent a change to an almost maniacal leadership focus on protecting patient data and the deployment of available tools and processes as an organizational imperative, 2014 will bring even more frequent and larger breaches of PHI.
Current data security climate
Even still, many healthcare organizations are not taking the necessary steps to reduce the proliferation of unprotected PHI in non-production test and development environments. Ninety-four percent of respondents to the third annual Ponemon Institute Benchmark Survey on Patient Privacy and Data Security had at least one data breach in the past two years, and 45 percent reported having had more than five total incidents each. Even more surprising is that the leading cause for a breach is a lost or stolen computing device that houses PHI. The survey also found that:
Unrestricted database administrator (DBA) access heightens risk: 73 percent of DBAs can view all data.
Data compromise/theft remains rampant: 50 percent of respondents say data has been compromised or stolen by a malicious insider such as a privileged user.
Organizations are under-coping:68 percent have difficulty restricting user access to sensitive data, 66 percent have difficulty complying with privacy/data protection regulations and 55 percent lack confidence that they would even detect data theft/loss from their own production environments.
Guest post by Richard Cramer is Informatica‘s Chief Healthcare Strategist.
The widespread adoption of electronic health records has been a key objective of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. With the pervasive use of these electronic health records, an enormous volume of clinical data is now becoming readily accessible that has previously been locked away in paper charts.
The potential value of this data to yield insights into what works in healthcare, and what doesn’t work, dwarfs the benefits of simply replacing a paper chart with an electronic system. There’s appropriate enthusiasm that this data is going to be a veritable goldmine for enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, and comparative effectiveness research. However, there are other, equally valuable, uses for this data to enhance clinical decision-making and improve the value of healthcare spending. Simply having instant access to large volumes of data that span thousands or tens-of-thousands of physicians, hundreds-of-thousands of patients and millions of encounters, offers an unparalleled opportunity to increase the quality and lower the cost of healthcare.
