By Healthcare Facilities Today

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other entities that do population health management will be heavily dependent on claims data from payers for the next 10 to 15 years, said Jonathan Weiner, professor of health policy and management and health informatics at the Bloomberg School of Public Health of Johns Hopkins University. 

According to an article on the InformationWeek Healthcare website, Weiner said that although clinical data is already being used, and is indispensable for certain types of information, paid claims data will continue to dominate this field.

Weiner, who also founded and directs the Center for Population Health Information Technology at Hopkins, said clinical data generated by electronic health records is insufficient for analytic purposes because of shortcomings in that data and the lack of interoperability among EHRs.

"To get a full picture of a population, you need hundreds of doctors, many hospitals, and many payers, and it's going to be a long time until they're all interoperable," he said in the article.

Read the article and Weiner's five part hierarchy of EHR needs