In the first post of this 2 part blog we explored the big challenges with the demands that the ARRA HITECH and other compliance and regulatory impositions have impacted Healthcare IT: HIPAA’s Version 5010 conversion, ICD-10 migrations, Meaningful Use of EHRs and their Attestation and Accountable Care Organizations.  We also briefly touched the popular topic of the imminent end of the world in 2012 according to the Mayan calendar prediction.

If you read carefully you would have noticed that my predictions, well, they have some small glitches now and then, or you may call them “bugs” due to my software developer background.  So at the end of this blog we’ll have to revisit the end of the world prediction.  Sorry folks.

The ICD-10 deadline, as of last week, was announced by the HHS Secretary Kathleen G. Sebelius the intent to delay the compliance date.  Hopefully the delay will not be such that it has a big impact on healthcare interoperability projects.  ICD-10 would help the way healthcare data is stored and exchanged between systems.  One of the drawbacks of ICD-9 is that since it lacked codes to describe many diagnosis or procedures clinicians and related clerical staff would use the code that closely matched the reimbursement amount expected.  Pro-active healthcare organizations should move forward with their ICD-10 conversion projects since it solves many inherent problems contained in their data that hinders interoperability in a meaningful way.

Data Aggregation and Mining for Successful Quality Measurement Reporting and Performance Improvement Requirements

Going back to the topics we left off in our previous post, I would like to dive a little into data aggregation.  Healthcare data is contained in many source systems inside a hospital organization and more frequently it can be found outside of the organization.  I have been in several projects where I’ve had to aggregate data located in 3 different states in the US!

If your organization plans to successfully meet Meaningful Use stages 1, 2 and 3 then getting control of your data is of paramount importance.  Meaningful Use stage 1 may appear to be trivial to many organizations but don’t let this mislead you as to the growing complexities of stages 2 and 3.  Albeit we don’t know the details of the requirements for stage 2, which are to be announced shortly, what we do know is that they will require more data from the different source systems.

Health BI, as an aggregation platform, can receive healthcare data from myriad sources; whether it’s from the inpatient Health Information System (HIS) , the outpatient Electronic Medical Record (EMR) or the Laboratory Information System (LIS) it can all come together in a single repository from which up to 600 Clinical Quality Measures can be reported!  Health BI is modeled after the HL7 v3.0 RIM.

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