Why The Time Is Right For Reference Data Management

The management and use of the growing volume of clinical and claims data to navigate evolving regulatory initiatives such as the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and the 21st Century Cures Act is leading many healthcare organizations to turn to reference data management (RDM). This technology provides the infrastructure needed to establish a single source of truth, enable interoperability, and optimize analytics for regulatory and value-based programs. RDM plays a vital role in normalizing your data, achieving semantic interoperability, and accurately representing a patient population for accurate quality measures reporting and analytics.

Recently, Dr. Brian Levy, vice president, Global Clinical Operations and Product Management at Health Language, took time to talk with Health IT Outcomes about the many benefits of RDM, the challenges you may encounter — as well as how to overcome them — when implementing it, and why it is important.

Levy has 20 years of experience in medical informatics, with particular expertise in development of terminologies and clinical content, and the use of the Internet by patients and physicians to improve care delivery. He leads a team of physicians, nurses, PhDs, and professional medical coders who maintain the terminologies, mappings, and other content in the Language Engine.