The Future for Pathology Informaticians Inexorably Linked to Analytics

The growing popularity of LIS modules such as Epic's Beaker inexorably leads to hospital/health system EHR personnel assuming greater responsibility for most of lab computing. This is in contrast to the past three or four decades when a small group of pathology-based informaticians and their staff exercised control over the LISs running in pathology departments. This turn of events prompted the following question in my mind:what professional activities will occupy the time and mind-share of the growing body of pathology informaticians now?Fortunately, there are two large challenges that will now be assigned in part to pathology informaticians. First will be the need to automate anatomic pathology to the same level as clinical pathology, accompanied by the deployment and LIS integration of digital pathology. The second challenge will be the development and testing of the four types of analytics tools that are now coming to the forefront. Here is an excerpt from a recent note on this topic (see:Healthcare Will Contribute a Sizable Portion of Future Earnings for Apple):...Apple has launched various projects that will provide the company with broad access to anonymized patient EHR records....The value of these records for Apple is that they can be the basis for the development of four types of analytics research: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive (see:4 types of data analytics to improve decision-making). Descriptive analytics provides in...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Clinical Lab Testing Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Lab Industry Trends Lab Processes and Procedures LIS Definitions and Strategy Medical Research Pathology Informatics Predictive Source Type: blogs