Sum-IT Health Analytics is completing another challenging and successful year. As we look back on 2020, we have been fortunate to work in areas that have become front and center with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our projects this year involved analytics for environmental worker safety and healthcare data interoperability and data sharing.
The pandemic has exposed how important access to timely analytics are to healthcare decision-making. In 2020, public health gained widespread recognition. Dashboards with visualizations on new cases, hospitalizations, intensive care unit capacity, and positivity rates were daily viewing as we watched the virus surging across the country. The data revealed the many challenges of fighting the virus and we saw how interconnected we all are when it comes to health. Personal factors, including occupation, household size and composition, as well as behaviors impact populations.
Sum-IT Thought Leadership
In 2020, Sum-IT used our analytics and public health expertise to support clients as they grappled with questions such as:
How can the workplace use analytics to keep workers safe?
What is still needed to realize interoperability of healthcare data?
What tools and data can be used to provide a comprehensive view of consumer health?
Working collaboratively with our clients, we developed new methods for analytics and took a strategic look at the most pressing healthcare informatics issues.
Sum-IT Recent Accomplishments
Dr. Miriam Isola, co-founder and chief strategy officer was recognized by the American Medical Informatics Association as a Fellow (FAMIA). In her work at the University of Illinois at Chicago she launched new concentrations in leadership and consumer and mobile health informatics. She also delivered numerous presentations about online learning, which was another popular topic in 2020 as education at all levels moved to a distance learning approach.
Dr. Kathy Schneider, co-founder and epidemiologist, is a co-author for two manuscripts recently submitted for review that examine predictors of length of stay in Medicare skilled nursing facilities – one considers primarily facility/staffing factors and the other also includes patient factors. She is also part of a multidisciplinary team that will begin a four-year AHRQ-funded study of outcomes from conservative versus surgical intervention for two musculoskeletal conditions (John M Brooks, PI, University of South Carolina).
It’s been quite a year for us all! We could not have done this without our team who brought deep expertise in statistics, epidemiology, pharmaceutical sciences, informatics, and nursing. As 2020 comes to a close, we wish everyone Happy Holidays and a healthy and prosperous 2021.