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BLOG: Three ways big data will change doctors' practices
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In this issue of Ocular Surgery News, our cover story discusses changes in the field of medicine based on data that can be aggregated from multiple sources, including patients’ portable devices, the internet and electronic health records (EHRs) – so called big data. Virtually all doctors’ practices will be touched by these changes, if not already. Here are three ways big data is likely to change the practice of most physicians:
1. More transparency will improve practice.
Already, with Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), most ophthalmologists are reporting some simple standards of how they practice, but this will expand. Standards will become more subspecialty specific, and even managed care companies may demand records of large numbers of patients (deidentified or HIPAA-compliant) to stratify doctors and their care. Naturally, most physicians will bristle at this, but is it realistic to think that our work should not be open to scrutiny? So long as we physicians can defend ourselves in appropriate cases, such as when higher complication rates occur in highly morbid populations, this can be a useful learning experience as well as an opportunity to improve our practices.
2. EHRs will work for doctors, not the other way around.
Two thirds of doctors currently are dissatisfied with EHR systems, according to a recent survey by the American Academy of Family Physicians. That is probably because most of us spend time entering data into a system that decreases rather than increases our efficiency. New solutions, such as MDbackline and analytics tools, will harness the power of those data to help us actually save time and take better, more personalized care of patients. I can’t wait for the day when artificial intelligence helps us offload mundane decision-making to a well-designed computer system.
3. Much better treatments will arise.
Just a few years ago, none of us knew that alpha-blockers were associated with intraoperative floppy iris syndrome. While David Chang’s landmark study that defined that correlation was based on a search of paper records, how many more insightful findings will arise when we unleash data mining applications on our electronic health records? Medical research will change completely from being governed exclusively by prospective controlled multicenter trials to a retrospective look at disparate data sets where data mining can find common threads with high accuracy and specificity. Controlling for confounding variables is easy with hundreds of thousands of patients’ data to analyze. This type of research is already revolutionizing treatment in other specialties, like oncology.
Practicing medicine has always been about putting patients’ interests first. Opening the kimono of EHR may bare some of our inadequacies as physicians but it will also allow computers to help us better fulfill our mission. Our practice has happily embraced and benefitted from these technologies as they arise. Now is the time for all physicians to learn about the coming solutions that will move our field further forward.
Disclosure: Hovanesian reports he is the founder of MDbackline.