In my last article, I discussed how an incomplete picture of patient health can lower the quality and raise the cost of care. Healthcare has been fully digitized but the complete picture is stored in multiple data silos across hospitals, practices, health plans, consumer devices, and more. A data platform can unify these sources of information and provide a holistic view of the network and its patients’ health.
This aggregated and normalized patient health record is activated into analytics and applications and surfaced across the distributed workflows that drive patient care. The various EHRs continue to be operated for transactional clinical events and to drive the revenue cycle with the resultant data aggregated in the cloud to provide insights and intelligence. This approach alleviates the cost and headaches associated with rip-and-replacing EHRs while providing inclusive coverage for both employed and affiliated points of care.
Population health, however, represents just a slice of the potential opportunity from a health system’s activation of its data assets. Overall information technology (IT) spend can be significantly lowered while real-time operational insights are deployed to stakeholders across the organization. These stakeholders include patients, delighted by a transformative experience more akin to what they experience today in other consumer industries.
Extending Enterprise Analytics Beyond the Health Record
While the aggregated and enriched health record is foundational for population health, it does not by itself provide a complete set of performance indicators for the operation of a health system. An organization’s supply chain, human resources, accounting, costing, budgeting, capacity, scheduling, eligibility, compliance, and billing are all IT components of this picture. Just as the health record is distributed across multiple data silos, these functions are generally managed using different systems, each with its own software vendor and data model.
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To combine these data sources and to build dashboards that optimize operations and performance, healthcare organizations began implementing enterprise data warehouses (EDWs). These EDWs tend to be developed for targeted objectives and include a build of a specific data model and the development of a set of processes to extract, transform, and load data from the various data silos.
The annual spending of these investments in analytics can be considerable, especially when deployed in the health system’s data centers rather than in the cloud. This includes software licensing, application and developer support, depreciation of capitalized hardware, and IT staffing. When multiple systems are in place, there is also considerable overhead in managing and making sense of a fragmented solution.
Without an explicit enterprise focus on data management and governance, many organizations find these analytics capabilities to be disjointed and inefficient, with redundant storage of similar information, varying threads of logic that give inconsistent conclusions, and opaque data quality. This data complexity grows as new analytics capabilities are added and stakeholders can lose trust in the derived conclusions. Many organizations are finding themselves with a diminishing ability to react to changing business dynamics as their annual spend on analytics grows.
This lack of nimbleness was significantly exposed in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic when priorities were dramatically shifted more or less overnight. There was an immediate need to hyperfocus on the surge of critically ill patients, inventory needs for PPE and ventilators, bed capacity, staffing, daily reporting, and compliance — along with specific patient stratification for outreach for high-risk cohorts and (later) to optimize vaccine distribution. Plus, aggregated clinical and outcomes data were critical to the rapid development and dissemination of therapeutics for the novel disease. Many organizations struggled to activate their data silos in these new ways under the pandemic’s relentless timelines.
Source: Hitconsultant
