Moving Data To Where It Needs To Be In Healthcare
By Arvind Venugopal, Senior Product Manager, Cleo
Napoleon is widely considered a brilliant leader and battle strategist. Yet, despite an arsenal of advantages including better arms, the regularity of higher force concentrations, and the superior chess-like maneuverability of his armies across European battlefields, Napoleon eventually fell.
Waterloo is known as the site of Napoleon’s downfall. But it was the insufficiency of communication — a failure to deliver vital information concerning the proximity of enemy garrisons on the march — that deserves the lion’s share of the blame.
In the battle to conduct healthcare today, information endures. Industry pros, the latest gadgets, and even the most advanced processes can never overcome a shortfall in the capacity to communicate. The ability to efficiently move and share key data points throughout a facility enables execution of the right stuff to win. The inability to do so constrains performance and chokes off the path to decisive victory.
In healthcare, for example, providers are using de-identified clinical data while capturing additional streams from connected medical devices and monitors, along with information originating from diagnostic, therapeutic, and custodial services. Through analysis, patterns can be converted into actionable insight. By using analytics across a broad spectrum of connected information, providers can improve treatment, develop better medication, identify potential risk, and reduce costs.
However, the benefits of data analysis are contingent upon the ability to deliver the right data at the right time. For instance, understanding the correlation between a known side effect and re-admittance rates across a dispersed patient base being prescribed a medication requires reliable and secure information flows along every point of care. Still the possibilities spelled out in gaining such insight can lead to better prescription methods, better medical formulas, and cost-effective measures for lowering admittance rates.
At some point, most healthcare organizations try to answer the data integration demand with a mix of legacy, homegrown, and a clashing mishmash of transport infrastructure. It’s not that a provider ever sets out or plans to design an overly-complex quilt of disparate elements hoping it will somehow function together as a cohesive solution. Rather, patchwork systems usually evolve this way organically. Over time, as each new requirement is discovered and met by a new piece being added on, complexity grows, and new complications arise. Holistic integration infrastructure planning, which requires clear foresight to effectively build out an enterprise IT environment, comes as an afterthought.
Information is the most powerful tool in the healthcare arsenal. A significant level of real-time data access signifies the capacity for provider-wide optimization of rapid-response decision- making and operational streamlining. Information must be consistently moved, shared, and tracked to equip the organization with the kind of critical knowledge necessary to make early, confident, data-driven decisions with seeming clairvoyance on not only what is happening now, but also what is going to happen. The more capable a provider responds to changing conditions, the more impactful its achievements. Integration, therefore, implies significantly more than the ability to simply satisfy connectivity needs; an organization should look holistically to delight patients and other constituents.
A holistic approach means:
- all systems connecting business processes and enterprise operations
- all people moving, sharing, and collaborating on files
- all information flowing through the full business data topography
What we’re talking about here is a modern approach to doing business better. Comprehensive insight into information dynamics, processes and operations, and patient loyalty and behavior predictors increase organizational competitiveness and business value.