Hospitals Turn Focus To Data Warehousing, Data Mining

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

The use of data warehousing, and in turn, data mining, are important steps in harnessing the power of healthcare data to create truly patient-centered care environments. According to an HIMSS sponsored presentation at the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit, only 43 percent of hospitals were using advanced data warehousing in 2013.

IT Leaders Shifting Their Focus

According to HiTech Answers, the 57 percent of US hospitals that have a basic EHR system have begun to shift their priorities toward systems like enterprise data warehousing that mine EHRs for insights into care improvement and cost reduction.

CIOs are already on board. According to Gartner’s 25th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey (released in February of this year), the number of hospitals indicating that their top IT priority is leveraging information through data warehouses and BI systems almost doubled since 2001, increasing from 9 percent to 17 percent. During that same time period, the number that ranked Meaningful Use as their top IT priority dropped from 49 percent to 25 percent — likely indicating an investment shift away from the EHR and toward other technologies.

Two other trends support this interpretation. More than 90 percent of hospital leaders included in the survey already qualified for Stage 1 Meaningful Use and three quarters indicated an expectation to qualify for Stage 2 this year, meaning the stress of meeting regulatory requirements would be behind them for a while.

Also, while respondents indicate that their biggest business objective is focused around financial viability, the runners up were “improving operational efficiencies” and “improving patient care/quality of care,” both key benefits of proper use of enterprise data warehousing.

Requirements

Your client IT teams are likely going to be seeing more requests than ever to use the data that is being warehoused. That means that the reporting requirements in any IT solution you offer will take a front seat. According to Health Catalyst, any tool should offer the following features,

• Chief clinical officers’ requests for monthly summaries of their health system’s value, defined as outcomes per dollar spent
• The ability to repeatedly and reliably deliver information that combines clinical, financial performance, quality, cost, and patient experience data
• The option to highlight organizational performance relative to peers and national benchmarks
• Tools that efficiently extract critical data currently locked in EMRs, claims, and billing systems in order to make data acquisition repeatable
• “Bullet-proof” tools that automate the integration of disparate data sources so a hospital’s clinicians and staff spend their time analyzing rather than acquiring data

To read about some of the data capture solutions around the healthcare vertical, read our article, “Using healthcare Data Capture Solutions To Improve Patient Care.”