Next year will be an important one for health informatics and social media utilization in the health sector, as security and privacy models are re-assessed to cope with evolving technology and social networking avenues, predicts PricewaterhouseCoopers' Health Research Institute in a recent report.

Health organizations will considerably invest in health informatics, forming data-sharing partnerships with organizations that have mutual interests in new uses of information. The report states this will improve health outcomes, coordinate patient care, identify population health trends, speed targeted product time-to-market, and identify and manage high-risk populations. But before data assets can be maximized, the industry will need to work out privacy and security kinks.

"Awareness of data security and privacy is growing," said Lindsey Jarrell, principal and co-lead of the electronic health record practice. "Health care organizations and patients are understanding health care data, security and privacy more and more."

In PwC's nationwide poll of 1,000 U.S. adults, six in 10 surveyed said they would be comfortable having personal health information shared among health organizations (including hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies) if it would improve the coordination of their care. When choosing one hospital over another, surveyed patients said that if cost, quality and access were equal, clear privacy and security policies were more important than hospitals' use of electronic health records.

"The survey results indicate that consumers and patients understand that the health care industry is taking patient security and privacy very seriously," said Jarrell. "Six years ago, patients had little trust in health care organizations of all types. We see trust is now increasing as patients begin to understand that the likelihood of patient outcomes will improve with shared data."

Aside from security and privacy matters, the industry will need to address issues around data collection, quality and integration, develop scalable analytical tools and overcome the shortage of skilled informatics professionals and trainers, said PwC's report. In the past five years, a lot of legislation has come out of the federal government relating to these issues, including Medicare's Value-based Purchasing Program and accountable care organizations.

"Health care organizations are constantly incentivized to use patient data appropriately," said Jarrell.

Social media savvy
Linking with health informatics, 2012 will see more stakeholders enter the data-sharing mix through social media - another avenue which risks the overexposure of information. To prevent this, health care organizations will need to build more granular access-controlled models, said PwC's report.

Social media has been utilized for health care purposes by nearly one-third (32 percent) of PwC's survey respondents, including half of people under the age of 35. The trend is expected to grow in 2012, as social media become part of organizations' overall strategy to improve health care and outcomes, helping patients connect with health organizations and other people with shared interests.

"The importance of social media for health care purposes will continue to grow as more people with chronic diseases use social media channels," Jarrell said. "Social media will help to create a feeling of connectedness between health organizations and patients."

Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube enable health organizations to gather real-time feedback as patients express opinions, rankings or reviews. The health industry can also use social media as an outlet for public interest stories, new product launches, supporting public health initiatives, and patient education.

"We see more and more health care organizations using Facebook or Twitter to announce education initiatives and linking to YouTube to give patients more information - they are using these sites to provide their patients with further resources," said Jarrell.

Based on the U.S. Hospital Social Network List, 1,229 hospitals nationwide currently use social networking tools and 4,118 hospital social networking sites exist. There are 575 that have YouTube Channels; 1,068 have Facebook pages; 814 have Twitter accounts; and 566 have LinkedIn accounts.

"Moving forward, we see tremendous growth across all health care organizations as technology gets better and as our understanding of how to utilize clinical information to improve patient outcomes gets better," said Jarrell. "We are going to see a huge focus on informatics and social media in the future."