Data is the life force of many of today's enterprises. Data enables companies to build better products and services, and to better sell them to their customers. This data comes at a price and, in some cases, is difficult to come by .
Health care organizations, on the other hand, possess enough data to make any enterprise green with envy. For years they have been gathering clinical data, patient data and other health care data. However, its value as a whole has been largely untapped.
Federal regulations are forcing organizations to reconsider health information management. As health care organizations put their data online, they are starting to recognize the opportunities available to leverage that data to lower costs, deliver better patient care and meet regulatory mandates. This Guide introduces health IT professionals to the technologies that can enable the benefits of improved health information management.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Key health information management terms
How can my health information strategy benefit from business intelligence technology?
A business intelligence solution consists of a data warehouse or data mart where large volumes of data are aggregated, as well as business intelligence software and business intelligence tools for executing ad hoc queries against the data.
Business intelligence tools are designed to support user inquiries that require data aggregation. In a health care organization, one such query might be, "what treatments are most effective for which patients with what diagnosis and at what cost." With information like this, physicians can provide faster diagnoses and more targeted treatments.
Business intelligence can also help health care organizations track and analyze trends on internal costs. The Institute for Musculoskeletal Health & Wellness at the Greenville Hospital System in Greenville, S.C., reports that its investment in an operational BI system helped improve annual profits by more than $10 million by helping administrators identify and correct operational shortcomings.
Business intelligence tools can also help eligible hospitals report on meaningful use hospital quality measures as required by the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs. While some of the information may be available through an EHR system, a BI tool is necessary to monitor progress in addressing quality measures over time.
We want to deploy a health care business intelligence system. Where do we start?
To begin, assemble a cross-functional team. BI project team members should include a data administrator, data modeler or data architect, an extract, transform and load (ETL) developer, network and security administrators and the CIO. Some of these members' roles may overlap, depending on the size of the IT organization.
The foundation of any health care business intelligence solution is data -- and that's where the team should first focus its efforts. Conduct a readiness assessment that targets the data sources that will be used to populate the BI system. This involves cleaning any "dirty" data. Make sure the data being provided by transactional systems is accurate and consistent from system to system.
To this end, substantial data cleansing efforts may be necessary. But don't cut corners. It is particularly important that health care organizations start with accurate data -- the system may be used for mission-critical applications, such as clinical decision support.
The team will also need to address data integration issues that may arise when departments become possessive of "their" data. This is when it becomes crucial to have the buy-in of a powerful executive who can help settle health information management disputes.
When the data is accurate and business requirements have been defined, the team can approach BI vendors and begin evaluating solutions.
How can my health information management strategy benefit from data analytics?
As a subset of business intelligence, health care data analytics offer a number of similar benefits. Most notably, data analytics can help health care organizations lower costs. In fact, this is the No. 1 driver for deploying analytical tools, according to the results of SearchHealthIT.com's recent business intelligence survey. Analytical tools can help lower costs by, for example, making it easier to keep track of medical inventory. It can also help automate back-end office functions such as billing and patient registration.
Twenty-eight percent of respondents to SearchHealthIT.com's survey cited a desire to create better clinical outcomes for patients as a driver for using analytics. With data analytics, physicians can search through past data on a given patient population to make informed decisions on one patient’s particular condition or to spot trends within geographic areas. Thus, physicians can provide the appropriate care to prevent illnesses from reoccurring or worsening.
How can my health information management strategy benefit from using enterprise content management (ECM) software?
Enterprise content management (ECM) systems manage and provide structure for unstructured data, such as audio, video, images, paper scans, faxes, etc.; in other words, all the data that is presently incompatible with EHR systems.
An ECM system and strategy can provide a number of benefits. To begin with, ECM software can help reduce the footprint of medical records storage by translating hard copies into electronic documents. Plus, the electronic database that holds these documents can be backed up for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes. An ECM system can also provide a legal repository for all the data that pertains to patient care but can't necessarily be integrated into an EHR system.
Finally, the structure ECM gives to otherwise unstructured data can help solve problems of interoperability between data silos such as physician EHR and radiology picture archiving and communications systems (PACS).