Hard Hat area.....The big issue with electronic medical records is trying to evaluate the return on investment and this article take things one step further. Many EHRs have what is now called a "patient registry" which is the first step towards full Business Intelligence management. This article has many good points and offers suggestions on how you can take current data and convert much of it to Business Intelligence files by use of aggregated data. If you currently have much of your data already stored in Microsoft Products, their Business Intelligence software could make very good sense with integration as it maximizes the use of Microsoft Office and the integration process could be a little less cumbersome and time consuming. The larger the health care facility is, the more it needs business intelligence. BD
Once the EHR data is de-identified and aggregated into population statistics and
patterns, entirely new possibilities emerge for generating value from that data by a number of participants in the healthcare industry. As mentioned earlier, however, analytics based on aggregated data of this kind have so far been overlooked.
Healthcare information technology generally falls into three major types of applications based on the problem they are developed to solve. For that matter, this is true of information technology in any industry. These three types are: Operational information technology, Communications information technology, and Analytical information technology.
Who are you serving? Where are they? What are the trends in the demographics? Are there trends in the medicines being prescribed? What is the impact of marketing drugs directly to consumers on your patient populations? What are the trends and cycles in allergies, side-effects, interactions and immunizations for your patient population? Are diagnostic labs being performed at a higher rate? Lower rate? What is the correlation between various types of tests and the resulting measures? Is there an increase in a certain type of recommendation with respect to particular diagnoses? Are your patients as a group getting healthier? Are there constraints (medical, financial) that prevent or promote one
recommendation or another? What policy changes could change various classes of recommendations and interventions? How efficient is your billing process? How efficient are the processes for contracted insurance companies? What impact does this have on your cash flow? Where are pockets of abnormally high billing and cash efficiency? How can these processes be replicated across the organization?
Insights such as these from improved business intelligence can drive performance in terms of quality of care, efficiency of care, effectiveness of treatment, service excellence, new areas for service growth and strategic decisions regarding facilities, staffing, funding and investment in equipment.
And this is just one source of data. Combined with other types of data from the financial, clinical, research and operational systems in your organization, aggregated data from the EHR represents a significant source of value for your organization.
Whether you have already implemented EHR, are planning to, are thinking about it or are planning an upgrade, take another look at your organization's investment in the EHR. Look at it from the perspective of access to a wide range of analytical information to answer an even wider range of business questions. See how this could change the EHR return on investment equation for you.
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