I use google alerts to provide me a sense of flow around articles. One of the filters is around bigdata and healthcare. The flow around this topic has increased. I see many stories, $100m investment here, $20m investment there, and so on. That’s alot of dollars! Alot of it is government backed of course and put on hyperdrive with a recent McKinsey report on bigdata and potential healthcare savings.
Breathlessly, drawing on my own bigdata and scientific background, I then ask, “well when should see the effects of these bigdata exercises?” The answer is not so clear. Just as I explained in my last post, there has not been a dramatic lack of analytics applied to healthcare. However, I do think to do more analytics because clearly there are many ideas and insights to draw on.
But it will still take a few years before insight turns into action. And it will take longer for any significant savings and benefits to be realized. Why?
Unless we solve the payment and incentives issues (also blogged on before) what’s the incentive for large scale change?
Bryan Lawrence in today’s Washington Post’s opinion article “The fine-print warning on Medicare” put it well.
- No real productivity growth in many areas of healthcare
- Benefits of reimbursement will never be given up to the government (every year we see this with Medicare payments, every year Congress avoids implementing payment changes, literally). This is the age-old question of making investments, “who gets to cash the check?”
- Lower prices usually leads to providers increasing volumes
- Congress will keep changing the laws anyway, you’ll never catch up.
You could peg this as cynical thinking, but its this type of envelope thinking that calls out issues that are hard to ignore and overcome quickly.
So while bigdata could give us great insights, implementing and acting on those insights (the change management problem) is larger and more complex. Its like the Artificial Intelligence (AI) claims back in the 80’s and 90’s that said we can really use analytics to get better answers. After two decades, the crickets were chirping. The value realization is better now, and it is clear, at least to me, that more people performing analytics can make a difference. But the real policy world is much more difficult to navigate.
There are no good answers to accelerate value capture from bigdata. Although everything from nationalization to forced integrated capitated models (like Kaiser) may be the only way to structurally change the system. It’s clear that competitive forces have been inhibited in the US and that there are externalities driving the dynamics of the healthcare system.
And the real change that’s needed is in you and I. We need to get healthier. And for that, we need increase both our personal commitment to better health as well instill changes in our government policies to change arcane food and commerce laws that lead to bad diets.