This new special issue in the peer-reviewed, open access journal eGEMs highlights lessons learned from the High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC), a provider learning network committed to improving health care value through data and collaboration. As the healthcare system continues to shift the focus from quantity to quality of care, delivery systems are under pressure to provide better care with smarter spending that results in healthier people. Papers in this special issue all provide insights into real-world challenges to achieving these aims and how available data can generate needed evidence to overcome them.
Reflecting the work of members of the HVHC, a number of the papers highlight insights from a two-year multi-site project on improving sepsis care with practical recommendations on strategies to align and clean data from multiple institutions in order to conduct meaningful analytics. Other papers focus on data-driven strategies for detecting issues such as risk of low health literacy, severity of illness and cost based on ICU length of stay, and hospitals’ use of observation stays to avoid penalties for hospital readmissions. Sponsored by Intermountain Healthcare, the special issue also points to high-level infrastructure issues with papers on leveraging diverse data sources to describe delivery systems and electronic medial record systems that produce computable data.
The full issue is now available here.