Analysis and health information will be paving the way for "improving patient outcomes, proactively identifying chronic and high-risk patients, managing patient population health and effectively managing their financial performance," the company explains.

The American Board of Medical Specialties approved clinical informatics as a board-certified medical subspecialty in September 2011. But big changes are required in the medical and nursing school curricula to provide students with insight and understanding of how to develop and use clinical data, PwC says.

Informaticists are not the only ones who need core informatics competencies; clinicians who deliver care to patients need them, too. Students need to learn to apply quantitative knowledge, reasoning, and informatics tools to diagnostic and therapeutic clinical decision making, but physicians with whom students work during residency may not be familiar with these informatics skills needed for emerging care models.

PwC's Health Research Institute is planning to publish a comprehensive report on the state of clinical informatics in the health industry. In developing the report, PwC's HRI conducted a survey of 600 health organization professionals from hospitals, health systems, health insurers and pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. The PwC survey found:

• Seventy percent of health insurers, 48 percent of hospitals and 39 percent of pharmaceutical / life sciences companies plan to increase hiring of technical informatics professionals over the next two years.
• Four in ten of the hospital and provider respondents surveyed said that lack of skilled informatics staff is a barrier to developing a comprehensive clinical informatics program.
• Half of hospitals and physician respondents said misalignment of clinical and technology teams is an organizational barrier, something they will need to address to incorporate sophisticated analytics into clinicians' everyday work.