Clinical

The way in which informaticians care for patients is through the use of data for care planning, care management and retrospective analysis of care in order to improve the safety, quality and efficiency of care.

  • In 2013, the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Survey showed that about 78% of office-based physicians used any EMR system.
  • These EMRs are beginning to generate clinical data in computable formats at an accelerating rate
  • Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, who come together voluntarily to give coordinated high quality care to their Medicare patients 
  • The availability of 'big data' / predictive clinical analytic capabilities is growing more slowly as the needs for this capability increase in the context of ACOs

Health Outcomes Consortium

We are actively exploring the formation of a Health Outcomes Consortium which would be a research and education clinical data collaborative with multiple, large clinical partners focusing on identifying, organizing and analyzing large clinical data sets to optimize specific health outcomes. This structure will allow the evaluation of novel data analysis strategies and provide such strategies to Consortium partners individually and collectively. The Consortium does not intend to consolidate or aggregate data across clinical partners given the costs, compliance and technical challenges. Rather, each clinical partner would maintain oversight and ownership of their projects and data.

These data driven health outcome efforts will offer a unique focus for students across all of our educational programs.