Providers Lag Behind Payers, Pharma on Data Exchange

Healthcare providers lag behind the efforts of payers and pharmaceutical/life science companies to exchange data with others, according to a PwC US Health Research Institute report.

"Many providers are focused on using their own data first," says Daniel Garrett, principal and leader of PwC's healthcare practice in Philadelphia. "In the pharma world, there's already an established economy around providing and consuming data, and in the payer world, they've been using data outside of their own systems to understand risk for a long time."

In its latest study, PwC surveyed more than 600 provider, health insurer and pharmaceutical/life science professionals.

The quality of EHR data was a concern to 87 percent of the pharmaceutical/life science organizations surveyed. Garrett says they point to lack of standards in how EHR data is collected, stored and aggregated. "As people understand that the data will be used downstream to make decisions on, they'll improve the time that they spend entering the data" and add to its quality and depth, Garrett predicts.