Geisinger Health System’s Chief Data Officer, Nicholas Marko (he is also a practicing physician, the director of neurosurgical oncology at Geisinger), joined me recently to speak about the points of contact between clinical care and health IT. We often think that bringing these parallel streams closer together is particularly critical as we transition from volume to value, but Nick opined that we need this confluence regardless of payment model. His focus is on bridging the gap between parallel silos of health information across multiple EHRs at Geisinger (Epic installs as well as other products) while at the same time ensuring that data from beyond the health care encounters — data that represents the bulk of patients’ lives — can be integrated with clinical data in order to yield actionable information. In addition, his team is working on extracting incidental observations that are often ignored in current practice but which could be valuable for screening purposes across large populations. When we spoke, the example he gave was centered on incidental radiology findings that were typically ignored by the ordering clinician since they were irrelevant to the diagnostic task at hand, but which could be filtered and directed to appropriate personnel who could reach out to patients seen to be at risk for other conditions, and who could seek to enroll them in prevention or treatment pathways, as appropriate. More >>