Dr Amy Abernethy on Improving Data Usage at the Point of Care

Transcript (slightly modified)

With all the data now available, how can we ensure that it is used at the point of care to improve care delivery?

There’s so much data available. First of all, it needs to be cleaned up, so that by the time the data gets back to doctor and patient, it’s something that’s sensible. So, in order to make it available and useful for a point of care, it needs to be cleaned up and put into order. It needs to be analyzed and information needs to be presented to doctors and patients directly in the electronic health record or in dashboards that summarize, for example, what treatments patients have been receiving and how patients that look like this person sitting in front of me, have fared on Treatment A versus Treatment B.

So, that set of activities which include data, cleaning and organization, as well as getting to the point of having analyses we can rely on and being presented in dashboards and other methods to make is easy at point-of-care, is going to be the way that data starts to change care. The first steps are there but I think we’ve got a long way to go.