How Analytics Are Changing Health Care

There is more to federal health IT than HealthCare.gov. And as agencies grapple with public health research and the care of their patient populations, innovators outside government are showing what's possible with improved electronic health records (EHRs) and predictive analytics.

Take, for example, congestive heart failure, a disease that afflicts more than 5 million Americans and yet can be prevented if underlying causes are caught and addressed early. Dr. Stephen Morgan, senior vice president and chief medical information officer at Carilion Clinic, has modeled medical and claims data from 500,000 patients over three years to identify 8,500 undiagnosed individuals at risk for the disease.

"We could better understand the populations at risk because we are already moving from episodic care to population-based care," Morgan said, adding that the next step is to feed that information back into EHRs so that doctors can choose appropriate treatment protocols.