Technology That Adds Up

Lakeland Regional Health Recognized for Data Analytics System

- Mary Toothman

LAKELAND REGIONAL HEALTH has earned national honors for technology initiatives that contribute to the delivery of best outcomes and the safest care to patients and families.

After a rigorous, onsite validation, Lakeland Regional Health was given high marks on how it makes use of computer data that may otherwise have gone unused.

The implementation of data analytics systems — which have become widely used in the past decade — has drawn attention to and made use of the type of information that has long been entered into computer systems and essentially forgotten.

Lakeland Regional Health was one of 10 health systems worldwide — and the first in Florida — to rank Stage 6 on the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Analytics— Adoption Model for Analytics Maturity (AMAM). The AMAM is an international benchmark for the use of advanced analytics to improve patient care.

Caroline Gay, Lakeland Regional Health’s Chief Population Health Officer and Chief Analytics Officer, leads a staffof more than a dozen professionals who work to make good use of stored information that was at one time largely ignored.

Making use of data that has been entered into the hospital’s computer system has been a gamechanger, Gay says. “In healthcare, we did not have a digital tool designed to collect and make use of this information,” Gay says. Now that there is a history of collecting and analyzing the data, the resulting information is especially valuable.