Health Informatics

From consumer-driven healthcare, to payment reform, to R&D innovation, the healthcare industry is undergoing profound—though evolutionary—changes. Connectivity and information will be the underpinnings of healthcare in the future. How various stakeholders make sense of the new information will help determine who succeeds in tomorrow’s healthcare marketplace. Informatics has become a required competency as the healthcare industry is shaped by greater competition, an increasingly segmented consumer market, and growing demand for scientific discovery that leads to a more rapid commercialization of better, safer, and more cost-effective drugs and therapies.

Informatics is the key to harnessing and sharing the most critical data. Successfully integrating and analyzing disparate sets of data enables clients to use informatics not only to further their scientific work but unlock and realize the full power of a wealth of information. In the life sciences, informatics serves as the critical enabler of collaborative science, personalized medicine, and drug safety programs. For consumers and providers, informatics can drive the quality and price transparency required to support consumer choice and provide the scientific basis for translational research and evidence-based medicine.

At Booz Allen Hamilton, we are thought leaders and market leaders in healthcare informatics and information technology. We understand that an effective informatics strategy for healthcare organizations requires expertise in industry-leading interoperability standards, knowledge of leading technologies such as open-source or service oriented architecture (SOA), and rock solid grounding in business strategy and organizational management.

Case Studies

• Streamlining Disability Benefits Adjudication—Booz Allen is helping speed the adjudication of complex disability claims and enabling citizens to receive critical benefits sooner.
• Combating Medical Identity Theft—Booz Allen worked with the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to gain a better understanding of the scope of medical identity theft problem and to develop a set of next steps to tackle an issue that has the potential to endanger patients' lives.
• Accelerating Drug Discovery—Booz Allen partnered with the National Cancer Institute and researchers across the United States to help develop the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG).

Additional Information

Read our thought leadership rooted in broad healthcare industry experience and expertise in systems technology.

• Interoperability of Health Information—Helping state and federal organizations work toward Electronic Health Records (EHR).

• "EHRs Not Sufficient for Data Liquidity"—This article by Booz Allen's Kristine Martin Anderson, Margo Edmunds, Mark Belanger, and Susan Penfield was published in the September 1, 2009 issue of Managed Healthcare Executive.
• Stemming the Rising Tide of Health Privacy Breaches: The Need for a More Holistic Approach—Why patient information is so often compromised - and what healthcare organizations can do about it.
• Toward Health Information Liquidity: Realization of Better, More Efficient Care From the Free Flow of Health Information—How health information and communications technology (health IT) can accelerate progress towards health reform and a genuinely patient-centered health care system.
• Creating a National Health Information Network (NHIN)—In our response to 24 questions posed by the Department of Health and Human Services, Booz Allen describes NHIN as the technology, governance, and business framework; legislative actions; and change management that results in interoperability among geography- and domain-based health information networks.
• Research Meets Practice—A nationwide cancer information network could use cross-boundary knowledge to promote a broad base of breakthroughs.
• Health Care's Retail Solution—Despite promising developments in recent years, much remains to be done to enable a true consumer-centric retail health care market. Drawing on experience and insights from client work and a proprietary study of consumers and physicians, Booz Allen is starting to see which factors will enable the system to work well.
• Collaborative Science: Making Ground-Breaking Advances in Clinical Trials—Booz Allen facilitates a National Cancer Institute project that is already revolutionizing cancer research.