Jan/Feb 2012

Healthcare will be a hot topic during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Barack Obama nearly two years ago is attacked or defended by the respective candidates and their surrogates. However, no matter who wins the White House this year, the U.S. healthcare system will be reformed, and more likely transformed, in the near future, and analytics is certain to play a leading role in that transformation. In fact, reform is already well underway, driven by increased competition within the healthcare industry, the trend toward “accountable care” and the realization that spiraling costs make the current system unsustainable.

• Peter Horner
• Atanu Basu

Healthcare analytics is poised to take off. The heavy government subsidies for electronic health records, the enormous need for healthcare cost control and the rise of analytics in other industries all suggest that healthcare has an analytical future. Consistent with this prediction, many organizations in the provider, payer and life sciences communities have embarked upon analytical initiatives.

• Thomas Davenport

Non-adherence to medication prescriptions is a health epidemic in the United States.

• Todd Steffes

Modern medicine has achieved great progress in treating individual patients. However, according to the highly publicized report “Building a Better Delivery System: A New Engineering/Healthcare Partnership” [1], relatively little material resources and technical talent have been devoted to the proper functioning of the overall healthcare delivery as an integrated and economically sustainable system. This report provides strong convincing arguments that a real impact on quality, efficiency and sustainability of the healthcare system can be achieved by the systematic and widespread use of methods and principles of system engineering.

• Alexander Kolker

Decision support is a crucial function for decision makers in many industries. Typically, decision support systems help decision-makers to gather and interpret information and build a foundation for decision-making. Such systems may range from simple software systems to complex knowledge-based and artificial intelligence systems. Decision support systems can be database-oriented, spreadsheet-oriented or text-oriented in nature.

• Runki Basu
• Norm Archer
• Basudeb Mukherjee

Chronic disease burden is growing around the world. In the United States alone, 48.3 percent of the population is expected to have one or more chronic disease conditions by 2020 [1]. As income rises in developing nations, chronic disease conditions such as diabetes are spreading rapidly, thus straining fledgling economic growth. In the case of the United States, chronic disease has serious financial consequences as healthcare costs are expected to claim 20 percent of the country’s GDP by 2019 [2]. Meanwhile, thanks to the 2010 reform legislation, an estimated 32 million more uninsured U.S. citizens will enter health insurance plans over the next few years [3]. Additionally, at the current rates of physicians graduating and retiring, the United States could experience a shortage of 150,000 physicians in 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

• Rajib Ghosh
• Theo Ahadome