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5 Steps to Healthy Data
Table of Contents:
The Case for Master Data Management in Healthcare Step 1: Build a Strong Foundation Step 2: Create a Single Patient View Step 3: Establish a Single Provider View Step 4: Improve Efficiencies and Service Step 5: Enable Cutting-‐Edge Initiatives
IBM Solutions for Healthcare MDM
Resources
The Case for Master Data Management in Healthcare
Healthcare systems do an excellent job of keeping people healthy — but their track record for keeping their data healthy isn't nearly as good.
Over the years, many healthcare IT departments have deployed a variety of software solutions for different purposes. That has led to a hodgepodge of legacy systems, many of which don't interact with one another. The situation is even more complicated for organizations that have grown by purchasing or merging with other facilities, each with its own software. As a result, when a patient visits a healthcare facility, staff may enter data about that patient and that visit into dozens of different applications. If that patient later visits a different office that is part of the same system, the staff at the second location may not have access to the data from the previous visit and may have to re-‐input the same information into an entirely new set of applications. And if any data has changed, such as the patient's address or insurance information, the staff often doesn't have an easy way to transfer those changes to the applications used by other parts of the organization.
As time goes on, organizations can generate numerous individual records for the same patient, some containing contradictory data. An IBM study in one country with nationalized health care found that of 13 million patient records spread across 12 different systems, only 5.1 million were unique. In addition, nearly half of
those records had incorrect telephone numbers, and 6 percent had missing or incorrect birth dates. That sort of unhealthy data results in wasted time and money, and it can even affect the quality of care.
Healthcare systems plagued by these problems have a better option. Master data management (MDM) solutions help ensure that the information in IT systems is as up to date as possible. Such solutions provide a unified, accurate repository of data and share that data among the various providers and disciplines involved in patient care. That means healthcare professionals don't have to waste time re-‐inputting data into multiple applications. Medical errors become less common, and caregivers find it easier to work together for the good of their patients. In addition, when organizations have accurate data, they can analyze that data to discover which treatments and processes provide the best outcomes.
In this e-‐book, we'll explore in greater detail some of the benefits MDM offers healthcare systems. Nearly every healthcare system faces pressure to reduce costs and to improve efficiency and the quality of care provided. MDM helps organizations meet each of those goals, while preparing organizations to handle future challenges. Having accurate, unified data helps organizations build a strong foundation that will make it easier to weather the changes in the healthcare industry.
MDM allows organizations to create a single patient view, enabling more patient-‐centric care. It also allows them to create a single provider view, improving efficiency and provider relations. In addition, it improves the overall efficiency of a healthcare system,
benefiting society as a whole. Finally, MDM enables healthcare systems to participate in cutting-‐edge analytics projects that promise to bring great improvements in efficiency and patient outcomes.
Step 1: Build a Strong Foundation
All around the world, the healthcare industry is facing dramatic changes. In the U.S., for example, new regulations are changing payment models, and health care providers are looking ahead to the new requirements that providers make "meaningful use" of electronic health records (EHRs). In other parts of the world, healthcare systems face different challenges, including economic uncertainty and political unrest.
It's often difficult to predict all the ways that healthcare systems will evolve as a result of those changes. However, no matter what the future brings, healthcare systems will be better prepared if they take steps now to build a strong foundation.
Some refer to this process of building a strong foundation as "getting your house in order." What does that mean? From an IT perspective, getting your house in order means recognizing that your data is an extremely valuable asset. It means beginning to track that data more closely, protecting its quality and analyzing it to provide greater efficiency and better outcomes for patients. It means deploying MDM solutions and putting policies and procedures in place to safeguard data and manage it effectively.
In addition to preparing for the future, healthcare systems that begin to get their house in order will experience significant benefits today. From a business perspective, they'll improve customer satisfaction and enjoy greater patient and provider loyalty, including receiving more referrals. They'll decrease marketing and staffing costs, and do a better job of coordinating care with other
organizations. Most importantly, they'll have a solid foundation for making good business decisions.
From a clinical perspective, the benefits can be even greater: Sharing information across disciplines and with other providers can result in better outcomes for patients. Healthcare systems will be able to eliminate redundant testing and help prevent mistakes. Providers will have better access to lab results and other data, allowing them to provide better treatment plans. In the end, healthier data can lead to healthier patients.
Step 2: Create a Single Patient View The journey to healthier data involves meeting several goals. First, organizations must establish a single, consistent patient view. Using an MDM solution to build and maintain an accurate, unified view of patient information provides the foundation for moving toward patient-‐centric care.
To remain viable in today's world, healthcare organizations need to transition from an application-‐centric view of data to a patient-‐centric view of data. Under the old, application-‐centric model, staffers re-‐entered patient information into multiple systems, multiple times. When data changed because of a new diagnosis, new treatment or a move, staff would have to update all of the relevant applications manually. More often than not, however, this step didn’t occur in all applications, causing systems to get out of sync. The outdated data resulted in wasted time for patients and staff and sometimes affected the quality of care. In contrast, in a patient-‐centric model, healthcare systems maintain a unified repository for patient information, using an MDM solution. Under this scenario, providers with the appropriate permissions can access relevant, up-‐to-‐date patient data, no matter what the point of care. Changes made in one application automatically propagate to the other applications used by the healthcare system.
When evaluating potential MDM solutions for creating a single patient view, healthcare systems should look for four key characteristics:
• Standards-‐based integration capabilities. It shouldn't be necessary to update all legacy systems in order to use MDM technology — that approach is far too costly. Instead, the right solution should support existing applications and systems.
• State-‐of-‐the-‐art algorithms for cleaning data. This characteristic feature helps eliminate duplicate data and the associated costs.
• Extensibility. An MDM solution should have the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements.
• Support for complex, distributed IT environments. In healthcare organizations, this kind of environment is the norm. .
MDM solutions can benefit community health information exchange (HIE) projects as well as individual healthcare institutions. However, implementing a patient MDM solution that will be shared among multiple independent providers is more complicated than sharing information across multiple points of service within a single organization. Regulatory and privacy concerns mean that the MDM solution must have superior security and controls over who can access patient information.
Step 3: Establish a Single Provider View Accurate, unified provider information helps organizations improve provider relations and lower costs. By some estimates, incorrect provider data costs U.S. healthcare organizations $26 billion per year due to problems such as returned mail, delayed payments, redundant testing and dissatisfied providers who stop referring patients. However, having an accurate, unified provider registry can help organizations reduce costs, improve efficiencies and ultimately improve overall patient care. An accurate registry also eliminates duplicate mailings, helps ensure that invoices and test results are routed correctly, and improves provider satisfaction and referrals.
Once organizations have created a unified system for managing patient data, doing the same for provider data is a natural next step. Key features to look for when evaluating solutions include:
• Support for both individual and organizational listings in a single platform
• Robust matching technologies and data stewardship tools • The ability to distinguish between internal and external data
exchange needs • A flexible architecture that enables data exchange and
supports evolving standards • A secure location where users can view, maintain and
interact with provider data
• Electronic collaboration tools that easily identify new provider information and issue change notifications
Recently, the Baylor Health Care System, located in Texas, undertook a major project to establish a unified provider registry across all 12 of its hospital facilities using an IBM MDM solution. “We wanted to transition to an enterprisewide system that consolidated all identifiers and provider information into one system to create a composite view, and standardize practices for how providers are managed across the entire Baylor network,” explains Diane Ries, manager of interface services for the Baylor Health Care System. “With IBM Initiate Provider, we can more accurately define providers, centralize demographic and credentialing information, and distribute that information out to other systems from one location.” In addition, the new system helped Baylor meet compliance requirements and improve its marketing efforts.
Step 4: Improve Efficiencies and Service The advantages of MDM aren't just for healthcare organizations and patients. Society as a whole can gain benefits as well through improved public health and more responsive government services.
For example, some regions have used MDM solutions to coordinate care for chronically ill patients. Consider a patient who has just been diagnosed with diabetes. She'll likely see many different health care providers as her disease progresses. Her primary care doctor will monitor her condition and may refer her to a dietician, an endocrinologist, a nephrologist and/or other specialists. She'll need an assortment of lab tests, and she may need some physical therapy. If her condition grows worse, she may require inpatient care in a hospital setting.
With the right MDM solution, all of these different providers can access up-‐to-‐date information about the patient. They can avoid redundant testing and quickly connect patients with the resources needed to manage their illness. When used together with telemedicine and mobile monitoring capabilities, MDM can also help ensure that patients are taking their medicine and following their treatment plans. As a result, MDM can also help reduce the likelihood that patients with chronic diseases, such as the diabetic patient in our example, will need to stay in acute care facilities. Overall, better coordination and better treatment reduces the cost of treating patients with chronic diseases. And because the cost of treating chronic conditions accounts for half of all healthcare costs,
significantly reducing these costs can have a large impact for society as a whole.
Often, government agencies are involved in paying for or providing healthcare services. MDM can also help these agencies become more responsive to their citizens. A high-‐quality MDM solution can link data from disparate legacy applications, thereby providing an integrated view of data and enabling agencies to improve services, stop fraud and eliminate waste.
Step 5: Enable Cutting-‐Edge Initiatives For many healthcare systems, deploying an MDM solution is just the first step in a larger journey toward greater efficiency and improved patient outcomes. For example, some organizations are using their patient MDM solutions to perform operational analytics. At these facilities, caregivers or researchers can run a search to analyze groups of patients with similar conditions or symptoms. They can then identify trends and outliers to improve care for future patients. These solutions can assist with comparative effectiveness research, help detect rare events, analyze treatments and outcomes, ensure that resources are being utilized effectively and identify patients for clinical trials.
In addition, MDM enables organizations to build expanded, next-‐generation clinical registries. Traditionally, healthcare systems have maintained individual databases with information about particular diseases and treatments. The staff members at these separate facilities often use the data from these registries to help them see which treatments are most effective. This information has proven to be particularly helpful in the treatment of some cancers.
However, traditional clinical registries are usually restricted to the data from the small group of patients receiving treatment at a particular facility. MDM allows physicians and researchers to combine multiple clinical registries into one expanded registry. For example, multiple healthcare systems in different parts of the world could pool their registries related to a particular disease. With a larger data set, healthcare professionals would be able to increase
their understanding of diseases and treatments much more quickly, improving care for patients. In addition, researchers could combine registries from multiple disciplines; for example, they could check cancer registries against cardiac registries and look for correlations between various types of cancer and heart disease.
These types of advanced analytics represent the cutting edge of healthcare and hold the promise of vastly improved patient outcomes. However, these advanced initiatives must have accurate data in order to return valuable insights. MDM solutions help healthcare systems ensure that their data is healthy, and these same solutions can help power the next generation of analytics.
IBM Solutions for Healthcare MDM
Accurate, easily accessible data helps organizations reduce costs, improve efficiency and ultimately provide better care for patients. IBM is at the forefront of MDM technology with several products designed to meet the unique needs of healthcare systems:
IBM InfoSphere MDM
IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management offers complete, proven and powerful MDM capabilities, enabling healthcare organizations to create trusted views of information and elevate the effectiveness of mission-‐critical business processes and applications. With more than 200 healthcare implementations, InfoSphere MDM is proven to meet every healthcare MDM need. Unlike application add-‐ons or toolkits, InfoSphere MDM provides a complete solution that delivers quick time to value.
IBM Initiate Patient Hub for MDM
IBM Initiate Patient Hub for MDM accurately matches and links patient identities to create a single view for use by electronic medical records (EMRs), clinical portals, administrative applications and analytics. It is designed to deliver results quickly and cost-‐effectively by leveraging IBM’s broad experience in the healthcare industry and providing a predefined patient-‐data model. By using its out-‐of-‐the-‐box configurations for patient identification cross-‐referencing and search, healthcare organizations can move confidently toward a trusted, patient-‐centric approach to information.
IBM Initiate Provider Hub for MDM
IBM Initiate Provider Hub for MDM integrates with existing systems and data sources to accurately match and link different representations of provider data to create a master view. Built upon extensive IBM master data management experience across a variety of industries, Initiate Provider Hub is designed to enable organizations to realize value rapidly and establish a foundation for strategic information-‐sharing initiatives that leverage the systems they already have in place.
Resources White Papers More Big Changes Ahead in Healthcare — Is Your House in Order? Unified View of Patient Data Enables Better Healthcare at a Lower Cost Accurate Patient Identities Increase Community HIE Participation and Trust Provider Registries: Reduce Health System Costs, Increase Efficiencies, Improve Care Addressing the cost of chronic disease with better-‐informed and coordinated care Citizen-‐Centric e-‐Government Enabling operational healthcare analytics with IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Next-‐generation clinical registries to transform patient treatment and care
Solution Briefs IBM InfoSphere: Solutions for Healthcare IBM Initiate Patient Hub for MDM )IBM Initiate Provider Hub for MDM Case Study Baylor Health Care System Case Study: Mastering Provider Data for Enterprise-‐wide Advantage
About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping clients innovate. Drawing on a breadth of capabilities and best practices from across IBM and our extensive partner ecosystem, we offer clients within every industry, a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that can help them improve productivity, respond rapidly to the needs of their business and reduce development and operations costs. www.Ibm.com
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