By Healthcare Facilities Today

Health care is an information business according to Dr. Bill Tierney, CEO of the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute. In a recent blog in the Indianapolis Business Journal, J.K. Wall talked to  Tierney about how shift from information scarcity to abundance will transform healthcare.

Doctors spend most of their time collecting information from patients, Wall wrote. When a doctor gets enough of the right information, he or she can make a diagnosis and, from there, a prescription for treatment.

This view of healthcare as information seems to be gaining popularity among the entrepreneurs, hospitals, doctors and insurers helping to develop new technologies to track, test, diagnose and treat patients, Wall said. 

Health care is actually rapidly moving into a state of information abundance — where remote monitoring via smartphones, social media, prescription drug sales data and the rapid transfer of digital medical records will overwhelm the information that a single health care provider can gather from occasional patient visits, according to the blog.

“Data is going to be the new currency of health care,” predicted Brian Norris, who was a nurse for 15 years in Fort Wayne, then went back to school to get degrees in informatics.

“If you harness that information, you can start to look at processes and inefficiencies in conjunction with costs,” Norris said. “Where should I be delivering that care? Should it be in the hospital or should it be in the patient’s home or should it be in a clinic?”

Read the blog.