Every summer the business analytics and data management company, Information Builders, holds a conference to bring together thousands of company employees, representatives from international conglomerates, and a variety of other attendees. With upwards of 140 presentations and technical workshops spanning three days, there is always something to learn for everyone. This year, Medgadget was invited to attend Summit to learn about Information Builders’ most recent forays into the Healthcare sector.
The summit kicked off with a keynote presentation by the CEO of Information Builders, Gerald Cohen, announcing a variety of new technical features and tools that have been introduced since last year’s conference. Among these announcements was the rebranding of their hospital information management tool “Omni-Health Patient” as “Omni-HealthData Provider Edition.” Touted as a solution that enables a holistic view of patients, providers, and a variety of other critical healthcare domains, this suite of applications goes hand-in-hand with the “Omni-HealthData Payer Edition,” which aims to give insurers a comparably detailed overview of claims and related clinical data.
The Omni-HealthData Provider platform aims to enable a comprehensive view of the patient and their environment.
Also new this year is the introduction of a new group of applications called “Omni-HealthData Insights.” Built in partnership with Pennsylvania’s St. Luke’s Hospital Network, this crucial tool gives healthcare institutions easy access to off-the-shelf tools that enable physician practice management, evaluation of patient safety and quality of care, and a host of other business intelligence services that can lead to informed decision making at a hospital managerial level.
Jake Freivald, VP Product Marketing for Information Builders, helped us understand the difference between these three products. “The Omni-HealthData Provider and Payer editions are the data management side of the house, while Insights is the business intelligence and performance management side. The Payer edition gathers clinical data that’s necessary for insurance claims – it helps calculate things like admissions rate, deployment of care, and so on to help evaluate how well a healthcare institution is doing. The Provider edition, on the other hand, helps us understand outcomes by understanding the patient and their healthcare provider.” The Insights platform brings all of this data together and provides hospital administrators and physicians with a 360-degree-view of the patient and their environment.
“For a hospital to understand the patient, it has to not only understand what’s happening within its (multiple sets of) four walls, but to also track what’s happening out in the community and after patients are discharged,” says Freivald. “It gets complicated. Patients are often admitted to multiple local hospitals over their recent history, so it’s not enough to know about your hospital – you have to know what’s going on in the whole system.”
An example of what a hospital administrator’s Omni-HealthDataInsights dashboard might look like.
Perhaps the most important usage of this suite of analytics solutions is to understand how routine hospital practices translate into clinical outcomes. “Together with St. Luke’s Hospital, we wanted to look at a variety of their key performance metrics. For example, they wanted tools for physician and practice management – what is a physician doing, how much is it costing, how effective is it, and how satisfied are their patients? Doctors want to know whether they’re doing a good job or need to step up.” In an environment as complex as a hospital, managing this data is increasingly tricky. Freivald admits the difficulty of this challenge, “The collected data is not easy to interpret. Something as simple as readmissions is a good example. If my wife goes into the hospital to have a baby and then after a few weeks is back in the hospital for a broken arm, that’s not a readmission. But if she goes back in for an infection, it probably is. So you need to have the underlying data foundation and algorithms to properly manage data and show the true outcomes. That’s what Omni-HealthData Insights is for. It’s directly fed data that’s collected and managed by Omni-HealthData Provider, and makes it usable for decision makers.”
While the Omni-Health Patient/Omni-HealthData Provider Edition has been on the market for two years, the addition of the Insights platform has significantly improved its usability and utility. Having this level of control over patient data opens up interesting potential opportunities for users of these tools, explained Freivald. “The level of granularity provided by these tools allows you to pick out more than anecdotal evidence. If you wished, you could actually pull out all the patients that were administered a treatment, along with relevant data like patient characteristics and facility of treatment, to show how advantageous an intervention is. Some treatments are more expensive than others, so you would be able to actually track which interventions don’t provide a significant improvement yet cost a lot more.”
For more information on their venture into healthcare analytics, read our interview with Michael Corcoran, Chief Marketing Officer at Information Builders or keep an eye out for their upcoming Summit 2018 in Orlando!
More on WebFOCUS in the hospital from Quinte Healthcare’s Director of Health Information Services, Peter Papadakos:
