Research

Developed with the intention of providing the membership community with insight into our research focus areas for the year ahead, this 2016 research overview will highlight core areas of the healthcare IT subject space—with the ultimate objective of supplying members with strategies and best practices they can leverage to improve health care IT performance across the continuum.

Over the past year, the focus of Academy research has followed the major trends that have prevailed in the healthcare industry. For instance, continued interest in mergers, acquisitions, and affiliations has resulted in a number of persisting challenges related to application and infrastructure lifecycle management. The Academy has spent some time investigating best practices with regard to application consolidation and management, but these trends will likely continue well into 2016.

Moreover, it is important to note that The Academy has seen a great deal of interest in topics that cross the three pillars of the research framework: Infrastructure & Services, Applications & Security, and Clinical Informatics. As an example, the aforementioned affiliation activity has produced an increased interest in infrastructural standardization and consolidation best practices, but this has also had a direct impact on how organizations are managing their application profiles. It has become critical that health care IT take the lead on identifying critical application and infrastructural assets, setting lifecycle expectations, and phasing out legacy resources.

There have been fewer shifts in focus for some department leaders than there were in 2015, but there are still some issues that are top of mind for Academy members. Our research finds, many are working to identify how to effectively operationalize and fully integrate health informatics as a discipline. For some, this has taken the form of more project-focused CMIOs and informatics leadership, and for others this has been addressed with a revision of traditional project management practices.

Many organizations are also responding to market and consumer trends as they set three-to five-year strategic plans. A continued focus on supporting consumer-driven care and improving access to personal health information has had a significant impact on the healthcare vertical. Many are working to meet not only existing engagement goals, but are also extending the reach of their organizations via mobile technologies, wearable patient-facing monitors, and improved diagnostic models. In 2016, it is likely that many of the points of intersection between access and engagement goals will continue.

Infrastructure & Services
Major changes in the healthcare infrastructure space have impacted the short term plans of many healthcare organizations. For instance, demand for high availability and reliability have produced an increased interest in resource convergence and network virtualization. In 2016, many are focused on improving the efficiency of their IT infrastructures and ensuring that network assets are highly flexible and fault tolerant.

Applications & Security
Application consolidation and clean-up projects will be continuing into the 2016 calendar year as many organizations face increasingly complex application profiles. This requires not only a standardized and efficient lifecycle management strategy, but also the occasional investment in more emergent application hosting methods. With health leaders investigating the viability of hybrid hosting environments and healthcare-as-a-service trends, the application marketplace has seen considerable changes in the last year. In order to address some recent trends and anticipated changes, The Academy’s research in this area will focus on the access, scalability, and reliability of resources.

Clinical Informatics
In the clinical informatics space, many hospitals and health systems are investing in improved diagnostic models based on combined clinical risk assessment scores. This topic presented itself in 2015, but continued interest in honing and improving these models necessitates further research. Similarly, investments in population and regional health management have presented new care modeling and planning opportunities.

As you address these complexities and drive improvement initiatives at your own organization, stay in touch with the Information Technology Academy for objective research to support your operational improvement efforts.