Do you want the bad news or the worse news?

On the surface, the healthcare system has a few problems.

Costs continue to rise and quality measurements remain flat. The US currently spends more than twice as much on each person for healthcare as most other industrialized countries, but it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through the use of timely and effective medical care. According to the WHO, the US proudly ranks as the 37th best health system in the world – just ahead of Slovenia.

Below the surface, it gets much, much worse. We are bombarded with stories on CNN and The New York Times about healthcare reform, electronic medical records, and “universal” healthcare, but industry fragmentation and poor coordination of services portends a further decay of our healthcare system.

According to a 2008 study by the Commonwealth Fund, 47 percent of adults reported serious failures of care coordination including: specialists not receiving basic medical information from primary care physicians, test results not being available at the time of an appointment; and, not being contacted or needing to repeatedly call to obtain test results.

Despite the individual technological advances that have been adopted throughout the industry, the system itself remains terribly siloed, and thus ineffective. Currently, seventy-five cents of every health care dollar we spend is on treatment of chronic disease, most of which is preventable if evidence-based medicine is practiced.

Predictive modeling offers a solution that directly addresses these issues. By aggregating data from multiple stakeholders and combining it with advance data mining and forecasting abilities, we can now successfully identify the specific individuals who will account for a majority of future health-care costs. With early detection comes early intervention.

Proactive identification of patients not following evidence-based treatment protocols, and the provision of that information to providers and patients leads to more effective and efficient care, particularly around chronic diseases. Leveraging a technology like predictive modeling across the care continuum will simultaneously address fragmentation, provide stakeholders with what they need to know when they need to know it, and facilitate physician engagement — all leading to improved quality and decrease spending.