With ACOs firmly entrenched within the U.S. healthcare system, ACO administrators in recent years have focused their success and performance metrics on financial, quality, and care coordination measures. Yet an entire range of key performance data is also available from ACOs’ most readily accessible information resource: their patients.

Health literacy plays a key role in the management, control, and prevention of disease in general. However, it is of particular importance in diabetes, due to both the disease’s chronicity and its effect on quality of life. Effectively, health literacy levels directly influence overall quality of life, especially in the elderly population.

In this case study, with nearly 600 medication labels prepared per day, the atmosphere was rife for potential error. Many drugs have similar-sounding names, and during the labeling process the technician is likely to be multitasking, under time pressure, and subject to multiple interruptions (not to mention a consistently noisy environment).

The first order of change is to shift the performance standard in the right direction: toward each patient’s best interests. And to do that—to learn what best serves a particular patient—the person performing a mundane procedure must literally shift brain regions.

Most of the time, the last person in a chain of errors is assigned the blame for the final outcome of a procedure gone wrong. In the case of medicine, this is usually the physician, surgeon, anesthesiologist, or other caretaker who assumes primary responsibility for a patient’s safety.

In this Q&A with Christopher Rafter, chief operating officer of Tampa-based Inzata Analytics, he speaks about the future of data analytics in healthcare and how they can improve the effectiveness of patient care.