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Smart data fabric helps overcome hidden cost of bad healthcare data

By Henry Adams, Country Manager of InterSystems Sub-Saharan Africa

Even though most healthcare organisations feel that access to real-time and harmonised data is essential for enabling leaders to make informed operational decisions, very few fully trust the data at their disposal. This is where leveraging a smart data fabric can be critical to mitigating the risk of bad quality data. One of the strategic priorities for healthcare providers over the next 12 months is to create and share high-quality data across the organisation. 

Given the alternative, they have no choice but to do so. For instance, a US study has shown that poor quality data costs industries in that country more than $3.1 trillion annually. From a healthcare perspective, 35% of denied claims result from inaccurate patient information, and $2.5 million in hospital claims were denied due to inaccurate data. Even though similar local statistics are not available, the situation in South Africa is unlikely to be any better.

Difficulties collecting data

There are several factors impacting on effectively collecting data. Firstly, continued merger and acquisition activity and a general industry consolidation make the IT environment an incredibly complex one to navigate. Part of this sees the proliferation of IT systems and vendors. It creates the need to coordinate data from multiple external data sources. But the influx of these data sources makes the technology environment challenging to manage effectively.

Another factor is the acceleration of performance-based payment and measurement models, which introduce more elements from a quality management perspective. As such, healthcare organisations must worry about the additional complexity of their programme management strategies.

Finally, consumers are increasingly demanding access to digital healthcare solutions and tools, increasing the complexity of data collection. Therefore, healthcare providers must balance the need to innovate to meet customer demand with the requirement of securely integrating data across different operational silos in their organisations.

Data fabric in action

On a practical level, a smart data fabric can unlock significant value to many common data challenges healthcare organisations face today. For instance, IT spends a considerable amount of time aggregating and harmonising data. But a smart data fabric will streamline a healthcare provider's ability to extract and blend data by reducing the time spent identifying and fixing data errors.

Duplicate patient records are also common, a problem that can be negated with a data environment that can identify and resolve errors upfront. The result is that clinicians and support staff have a single source of truth to make the right care decisions given a higher quality of data.

Optimise everything

The growth of performance-based payment systems has significantly increased the number of quality measures required. In the US, staff spend 785 hours per physician tracking and reporting quality measures. Using a smart data fabric, an organisation can quickly harmonise data from disparate sources and reduce the manual effort required by staff when tracking and reporting on quality measures. So much so that some organisations have reported a 50% drop in time spent managing quality measures.

The average healthcare provider has at least 10 analytical platforms to manage and maintain, which are time-consuming to integrate, not even mentioning the risk of human error when inputting data. Again, a smart data fabric lets companies consolidate overlapping infrastructure and reduce the number of platforms they use.

Missing data links

As with many other industry sectors, Shadow IT projects are cause for concern as these projects can consume up to 40% of the available budget. A smart data fabric mitigates this risk by introducing a virtualisation approach that reduces the IT spending required to consolidate overlapping infrastructure. It also increases the efficiency of existing hardware and enhances the resilience of disaster situations.

Another use case for a smart data fabric in healthcare is reducing prior authorisation denials due to missing data. In the US, 28% of first-time pre-authorisation requests are rejected by payers, which could be remedied if the data essential for prior authorisation is more pervasively available.

New opportunities

Healthcare organisations can save millions of rands to better drive quality and introduce easier to manage and maintain data sets by moving to a smart data fabric. Further, they can capitalise on enterprise-wide open analytics, embedded technologies (for instance, artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics), and integration with any data source.

It also paves the way for self-service business intelligence, improved data security and data integration in the public and private cloud. The bottom line? Better patient care.

Considering that the cost of not optimally and adequately leveraging the data available to the healthcare organisation is high, a smart data fabric sets up analytics in such a way to make the data actionable and create a transformative healthcare environment. An environment that puts the patient at the centre of every service delivered.

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