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What Is a Healthcare Data Lake and Why Do You Need One? Imagine a Supermarket

Using a supermarket analogy, this article helps healthcare leaders understand what data lakes are (open reservoirs for vast amounts of data), why they’re essential (they reduce the time and resources required to map data), and how they integrate with three common analytic architectures:

Early-Binding Data Warehouse
Late-Binding Data Warehouse
Map-Reduce Hadoop System

Data lakes are useful parts of all three platforms, but deciding which platform to integrate a data lake with depends heavily on a health system’s resources and infrastructure.

Once understood and appropriately integrated with the optimal analytics platform, data lakes save health systems time, money, and resources by adding structure to data only as use cases arise.

My Folder

On the Population Health and Cost Transformation Stage, Care Management Is the Star

Joe’s story isn’t a unique one in the U.S. Having been admitted to the hospital five times in one month, Joe isn’t taking his medications and doesn’t exercise. In short, he struggles to follow his care plan.

The Care Management Show, an entertaining, interactive theatrical performance, demonstrates why health systems need to adopt innovative, data-driven approaches to care management that prevent patients from falling through the cracks by integrating all aspects of patient care:

Data integration.
Patient stratification and intake.
Care coordination.
Patient engagement.
Performance measurement.

Throughout the show, the audience witnesses how care management done right transforms not only Joe’s life, but also Millrock Hospital’s profitability. We see how health systems can leverage technology to engage their “Joes” to increase care plan adherence and, ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

My Folder

Care Management Part 2 – A Critical Component Of Effective Population Health

Care management plays a central role in the world of value-based reimbursements, at-risk contracts, and population health management. Such programs require high-touch and resource-intensive care as teams work to deliver on the substantial promise of delivering patient care improvements while reducing costs.

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Mergers, Acquisitions, And Partnerships: Dramatically Reducing IT Consolidation Expenses With A Data Operating System

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Improving Clinical Processes and Effectiveness of Care through Creation of a Disease-Specific Registry

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a disease that affects the central nervous system of about 400,000 people in the United States. With no known cure, current treatment for MS is to slow disease progression, manage symptoms and maintain the patient’s quality of life. Effective treatment of MS requires detailed patient information be readily available.

To better monitor disease progression and long-term patient outcomes, clinicians with OSF HealthCare Illinois Neurological Institute collaborated with researchers at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria (UICOMP) to build a customized database.

The customized MS flowsheet registry resulted in several benefits, including:

20.9 minute reduction (per patient) physician time spent searching for data.
2.2 minute reduction (per patient) support staff time spent searching for data.
300% increase in investigator initiated studies.

The success of the customized database suggests possible expansion may improve outcomes in other chronic or specialty care patient populations.

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Clinically Meaningful Quality Metrics Improve the Provider Experience

Nearly half (46 percent) of all physicians report that they suffer from burnout, citing too many bureaucratic tasks as one reason. Providers want to find meaning in their work, and improvement on many current quality metrics do not predict better patient outcomes or experience of care. They are looking for tools to reduce their workload and improve their ability to provide excellent care, including having metrics and registries that are meaningful and informative.

Faced with the challenge of making quality measures meaningful, Partners HealthCare worked to redefine measures to be more relevant, create point-of-care registries to manage an all-payer population, created teams of Population Health Coordinators to support front-line teams in managing the registries, and used its analytics platform to monitor change and explore provider variation in order to improve quality. This resulted in:

85 percent of clinicians surveyed felt that the new metrics helped them take better care of their patients.
Quality improved at an unprecedented rate on an all-payer population five times bigger than the standard pay-for-performance population.
Near real-time measurement using clinical data eliminated months-long delays, while run charts and provider and clinic-comparison views turbo charged quality improvement.
125 percent increase in user adoption of the analytic tool (99 unique users, 674 unique sessions, and rising).

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