I read an article in CIO Magazine recently while doing research on big data in healthcare. The article discussed how to make use of the petabytes of patient data that healthcare organizations possess. No matter how we plan to use it, we have to extract it from legacy systems and build visualizations that can make sense of it.
This data by itself doesn’t make a company successful; organizations must act on information and filter what is useful, appropriate and above all else, actionable. Those few organizations that are able to leverage all of their data and harness the power of insightful and timely analytics have been differentiated in the market.
While I believe that big data and cognitive learning applications should and will play a role in healthcare to help identify which information is applicable and directional, I also believe that some data still needs to be structured. Examples of the importance of structured data include:
- Data used for measuring and applying quality interventions requiring a retrospective view using statistical process analysis to measure both before and after an intervention.
- Measuring operational performance, financial or clinical. If the organization doesn’t employ common metrics for making operational decisions then who is counting what? A common view of the operational metrics of any organization is essential to making the right operating decisions.
- Statutory reporting and / or internal financial reporting for an organization must involve adequate audit trials and repeatable processes to both comply with accounting standards and to ensure credibility. Medicare cost reports, income statements and cash flows are examples here.
How do we tame healthcare data for structured reporting? One way is to acquire and implement pre-packaged healthcare data model solutions which are uniquely adaptable to breaking down the silos in healthcare though an integrated model that expands across finance, clinical and research domains.
With healthcare focused on outcomes and cost right now, there’s a number of data sources that need to be integrated into the whole. Perficient’s High-Performance Costing Expressway leverages the Oracle Enterprise Health Analytics (EHA) platform to quickly enable a view of services line or patient encounter margin.
Perficient is exhibiting at HFMA National Institute 2015 #ANI2015 this week in Orlando. Stop by booth #1347 to view our demo and talk to us about your decision support objectives.
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