Some time back, we delivered a talk at a conference titled 'Data Liquidity.'  It was a fun talk, if for no other reason than we were propagating 'data liquidity' as a cool new buzzword.  The business types in the audience had something they could go throw at their IT staff to keep them wondering if the boss really did understand all this technology stuff.  One audience member later emailed in delight that he was throwing 'data liquidity' around in every conversation and it had people in his organization thinking he was a genius.

Glad we could  help, and we summarized the talk in a recent post titled 'Data Liquidity.'

Continual reading about ACOs is now a current hobby, or obligation, depending on your point of view.  We take in lots of sources, looking for big themes and new insights that we can share here. 

Clearly, the exchange of data across multiple organizations is going to be the lifeblood of ACOs, whether we are talking about a specific thing designed to participate in Medicare's program that flows out of the Affordable Care Act or the general concept of more coordinated care.  'Data liquidity' is far more fun to say, especially if you are not a programmer trying to get the bits and bytes in the right place.

But this whole idea really is about making the data flow -- digitized initially, and then across organizational barriers to a common place, and then to the people providing and coordinating care in a near real-time way.  This is the big deal.  And the hard deal.  A lot of organizations will manage to screw this up.

Here is the handicappers cheat sheet.  Ignore the ACO related press releases.  Those are easy.  Focus on who is actually getting the data liquid.  Who has solved the problem of integrating data from multiple sources?  Who has built the trust among the players to share the information?  Who can do actual reporting, and even better, who is using the data in real time to make decisions?

The winners will compete with data.  Everyone else is just blowing smoke.