Real-time clinical data is exactly what Christine K. Cassel, MD, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum, believes will drive improvement in the industry. She suggests that the world of value-based purchasing needs to quickly adopt the use of electronic health records and their ability to share data around a single patient.

With interoperable, patient-centered data comes the increasing need for analytic skills to understand the data, explains Dr Cassel.

“We’ve seen that if people get reports back in real time about data that reflects their care, they know then what they need to improve,” Dr Cassel says. “And even without attaching payment penalties or bonuses or any of that, they will improve—they have this intrinsic motivation to improve.”