Wasting your IoT Data?

Analysis from our Identity of Things interview series.
Wider Team interviews IoT (Internet of Things) policymakers, executives, technologists, and implementors each week to learn how the digital identity of things (IDoT) is playing out today in biopharmaceutical, healthcare, and energy industries. This practice insight is on healthcare and pharmaceutical IoT data waste.

HADI (High Assurance Digital Identity) shortages impair the ability of healthcare and pharmaceutical research to:

• establish provenance of data,
• secure data handoffs across systems and organizations,
• tie data to a patient, and
• orchestrate data from multiple devices in an encounter into a common view.

Headlines

• Poor data quality can lead to poor clinical decision making, poorer health outcomes, increased mortality and increased inequalities. 
• Up to 40% of EHR (Electronic Health Record) data captured is inaccurate, with most of this unattributable to patients.
• Hospital and primary care based IAM (Identity Access Management) human protocols are followed by healthcare professionals.
• IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) technologies and devices, including digital therapeutics apps, lack data identification controls.
• Patient data is inaccessible and unusable In most EHR systems.

Analysis

The majority of hospital and primary care EHR systems have IAMs protocols for healthcare professionals (HCPs) to enter patient data. In practice, however, numerous HCPs access EHR terminals because previous users fail to log out, leading to incorrect HCPs updating records.

A focus on interoperability has increased pooling of poorly identified and unprovenanced data.

IoMT technologies, using connected devices and digital therapeutic apps, have little or no assurance that data collected is patient identifiable. These devices are increasingly being used to capture clinical research data from patient studies.

As healthcare delivery becomes more decentralised, IoMT devices are used to diagnose and monitor patients. With poor Patient-to-Device identification, patient records run the risk of further clogging EHRs with even more poor data.

Drives by departments of health to improve data quality is ongoing with EHR suppliers reluctant to provide information on how they are addressing the challenge.

Interviewee Quotes

‘One of our businesses does audit of GP (primary care) surgeries, and unusable data is underestimated massively’

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‘Devices are generating a lot of data that’s landing in an EHR and other places for research’

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‘The NHS investment isn’t right. It’s playing hardball with suppliers, when its own infrastructure has poor data with data flows still stuck in silos. I would say the NHS is weak and more so in social care’

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‘Interoperability ensures that data is communicated accurately and quickly whilst staying safe and secure’

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