Healthcare Data Warehouse: Why You Need One?

We often hear a lot of questions when we talk about healthcare clinical data warehouse, such as: Is data warehousing in healthcare necessary? How important it is to have a tool like a clinical data warehouse for Hospitals and Medical Centers? Can business intelligence (BI) be the answer for hospitals looking for data-driven improvements and cost reduction? Yes... with new and improved techniques to handle BI and clinical data warehouse you can unlock the value of data and here's why.

In a rapidly transforming healthcare industry, the need for business intelligence (BI) and analytics is perhaps not too difficult to surmise, especially if you look at your organization's business intelligence strategy in terms of long-term and sustainable clinical data warehouse. You need to ask is: What exactly is my organization's business intelligence strategy? But regardless of your organization's answer, the term business intelligence can still no doubt be difficult to define and may have multiple meanings, which leaves organizations wondering where to turn for a solution.

Understanding BI and Healthcare Data Warehousing

Simply put, data aggregated from different transactional sources of a corporation or health system can be organized, catalogued and structured according to your need. All these huge quantities of data generated from multiple source systems of your organization enables understanding and facilitates informed evidence-based decision making.

Data/information generated from both internal and external source systems facilitates population-based queries, research and analysis. Internal data can be from costing or financial systems or electronic health records (EHR) systems or EMR or clinical sources and external data can be from state or federal government. The more you use data, the more you achieve a greater understanding of it and helps you make informed decisions which are intrinsic to any organization's operating efficiency and cost reduction efforts.

Conversely, locating the data you want from the right source can be a time-consuming manual process. People spend a lot of time and effort to gather or compile the desired data from the diverse systems of your organization and finally come up with something that makes sense for your executives to be up to date with the required information. This is where Business Intelligence comes into the picture. It helps in streamlining and scaling the process of converting raw data into meaningful bits of information that enables healthcare managers to take effective decisions and gain better business insight. That's what BI means.

On the whole, business intelligence integrates business, financial and clinical data into an effective data warehouse. In other words, healthcare providers use the data gleaned from these data warehouses to be able to streamline patient care, patient safety and outcomes while also complying with regulations and standards. Using data gleaned from the data warehouse, executives can base their decisions on facts and not merely on intuition.

Think of a data warehouse as a large kind of reliable, centralized library of hospital, clinical and financial data and information that can be repeatedly accessed not only for the purpose of information processing or management reporting but also address specific concerns relating to patient safety, patient health outcomes and state or federal government-regulated healthcare reforms implementation.

Healthcare delivery is definitely going digital. According to a recent prediction made by Gartner, in the current year the business Intelligence and analytics market is going to touch $16.9 billion (that is £11.6bn), growing at 5.2 per cent. In this context, we can say that the demand for data-driven operational care takes on new urgency.

Cloud and Predictive In Healthcare Data Warehousing

Through cloud-based technology: Rather than having information scattered throughout an infrastructure abyss, a cloud-based technology centralizes stored information in turn allowing for speedier access and scalable solutions that can be used or marketed to a variety of practices. There is no need for a highly complex, expensive IT infrastructure and access to numerous features conveniently located at a secured data warehouse facility, thus eliminating the need for a user to be trained on multiple programs. Cloud-based platforms can help your business grow, regardless of its size and type.

Through predictive analytics platform: Predictive Analytics component (or standalone option) enables data to be absorbed from diverse source systems. This platform draws patient data from various source systems and condenses that information to identify, analyze, diagnose, and treat according to patient symptoms and history. The predictive analytics framework identifies concrete evidence for successful diagnosis.

As far as the technology-specific domain of healthcare, medical claims processing is concerned, advanced analytics tools can help organizations analyze real-time information on their claims. This will ensure that the right information is presented to the right users at the right time. The specialized services can include service offerings in conjunction with medical claims processing, these are application development, product engineering, and essential managed services catering to the key segments of the healthcare ecosystem covering providers, payers, and pharmaceutical companies.

Put it all together, healthcare data warehouse with business intelligence are playing a major role in providing customizable dashboards, reports, and application features by creating a user-friendly environment that staff and multi-tier user levels can easily navigate and access the appropriate information in real-time. To be able to tackle the core internal information management issues, data warehousing techniques can help you maneuver all your pertinent data assets, logically and securely, while reducing your spiraling costs.

Prime's Healthcare Data Warehouse solutions, Cumulus, unite existing data marts by designing a custom data model for your healthcare institution. This approach streamlines user data while integrating reporting and medical analytics for critical decision making.
Knowing how to tackle core internal information management issues, Prime's Cumulus was designed to specifically assist your healthcare system in maneuvering all pertinent data assets logically and securely, while simultaneously reducing costs.