The following is a guest article by Bill Moroz from Information Builders who is hosting a free webinar on “Managing the Healthcare Data Value Chain from End-to-End to Break Down Data Silos”.
The healthcare data value chain is a concept not far removed from standard data value chains. You know, the ones that provide value from your data from inception through integration to use (especially analytics), and everything in between? Healthcare professionals have a particularly daunting data task, because health data has so many points of data inception and integration. We need to take our entire customer (patient or member) journey into account, with all of its data points.
When implementing the healthcare data value chain, you can start using the business value that comes from it, no matter where you are in the process. And as you move towards methods that keep your information fresh and accurate, this data can provide value to your efforts to assure high-quality, reasonable-cost outcomes in your healthcare organization.
Your healthcare data value chain will provide most value if you keep in mind some key data management principles along the way:
- You need to be laser-focused on your data consumers. If you are in an operational position, this could be your data analysts, your billing department, or physicians. Patients or payers are the focus in public-facing scenarios, so make sure your spotlight is on them as well.
- Figure out which data along the customer journey you want to capture. This data should be supporting what questions need to be answered, by both your internal staff and your external customers.
- Where will be you be capturing that data, and in what form? Healthcare information comes from a multitude of sources (EMR, financial, external) and you can receive it via handwritten notes, typed in manually, and from sensor and machine data (IoT), amongst others.
- Know at what point the data will be integrated into your system. Data of this type will be integrated at different times for several reasons.
- Ensure your data is accurate, complete, and consistent. Cleansing, matching and merging makes your information suited for reporting, analysis, and customer use.
In the end, when you have an effective healthcare data value chain, the information that is available will be uniform and used to record milestones for your population. Take advantage of this data to improve the overall quality of the customer’s health and engagement with your organization.
Health information exchanges are an important part of the healthcare data value chain. Whether it’s mandated by the government, payers, or internal best practices, you need to ensure that your data is interoperable and can be shared amongst all players. An added benefit is that once your data is standardized and can be shared, your organization then has the ability to lower costs, drive value, and enhance the customer experience.
Complexity is something to consider when managing your healthcare data value chain. When you are using external codes, or outside data, it adds one more step of difficulty in the process. Many healthcare organizations are limiting their efforts to data silos around the EHR and other key systems, but it needn’t be this way. Handle these complexities in an integrated fashion and you will make your data an enterprise asset.
To learn more about this topic, sign up for a brand new, free webinar “Managing the Healthcare Data Value Chain from End-to-End to Break Down Data Silos.” Learn about this from Bernard Brooks, Enterprise Director of Data and Analytics at Flagler Hospital and Bill Moroz and Bill Kotraba from Information Builders.
Information Builders is a sponsor of Healthcare Scene.
