The data in question is collected and held by a range of organisations. They include primary care providers, specialists, hospitals and government departments. Pooling this data as part of a population health management strategy allows sophisticated analysis and risk modelling that, in turn, can drive healthcare provision in new and exciting ways.
However this analysis is only ever as good as the quality of the underlying data. If that’s not complete, normalised and accurate, the resulting decisions will be flawed.
Even the largest electronic health record systems in the world still rely on obtaining data from other systems via a complex web of feeds. The data arrives in a variety of formats, generated by ancillary systems and devices that are constantly changing.
Currently, these disparate systems are generally not interoperable in any meaningful way. This in turn makes the task of assembling, cleaning and managing the data a significant challenge.
Naturally, the goal is to achieve effective interoperability between core health information systems. While there is hard work being done by standards bodies, government entities and non-profit organisations, it will ultimately flounder if technology vendors are not also involved in the process.
Unfortunately, some IT vendors have chosen to pursue a proprietary path, usually as a way to
preserve market share by locking out competitors. While their logic can be understood, the end result for the health sector is less than ideal.
To overcome such challenges, it is necessary for the needed interoperability to occur outside the systems in question – through the creation of an ‘open’ data exchange platform.
For example, at Orion Health we have created a platform that can handle the diversity and dynamism of interfaces that constitute a population health system. Our technology is intelligent enough to understand data requests and retrieve the proper subsets of information for the doctor at the point-of-care, the patient on a mobile device, the risk management analyst in his cube and every other participant in the continuum of population care.
The result is effectively a layer that supports the population health management goal by making the right information available to the right people at the right time.
By providing care providers with access to such an open data platform, we can improve their ability to solve the problems that have been plaguing the industry for a long time and take case management and care co-ordination to the next level.
Date: August 27, 2015