According to Gartner®, “Healthcare providers are in cost-cutting mode, and technology investments will be more heavily vetted in 2023 than ever before.”1
It’s incumbent upon you to demonstrate short- and long-term value for your customers. To compete and differentiate your solutions in a difficult economic environment, product leaders need an interoperability strategy that allows not only for the integration of systems but also ensures the integrity and usability of data for care, patient engagement, and analytics. Demonstrating that you have a reliable foundation for data quality will help you not only stand out from competitors, but also enhance the quality of data for your own organization.
What does healthy data look like?
Healthy data is:
- Always accurately matched to one patient, provider, or identifier
- Coded so that it is meaningful and consistent to the professionals and patients using it
The role of identity data in health IT solutions
Identity management ensures you know whom you’re talking about. By prioritizing identity data solutions, you help your customers gain visibility into their true patient population (and their needs).
Integrating an enterprise master person index (EMPI) solution into your products or services helps facilitate the real-time exchange of person data. With an EMPI, healthcare organizations and their IT vendors gain a 360-degree view of the data of individuals held in disparate systems across disparate systems to ensure that all connected systems can present a complete, accurate record of the latest information, with a clear line of sight to the data’s history.
For example, a patient engagement application designed to simplify a consumer’s experience through their healthcare journey could employ an EMPI to deliver patient information in a simple and streamlined way. With an EMPI, patient records from across systems are reconciled, supporting a more efficient intake process by matching existing patient records rather than creating new ones. This empowers your provider customers, who can make better informed decisions about patient care and referrals knowing patients are linked to the correct record.
The role of terminology management in health IT solutions
Terminology management ensures you know what you’re talking about.
Terminology solutions filter, organize, map, and group data so that it can be shared with semantic meaning across systems and organizations. They give organizations full control of managing their standard, custom, and local code sets and subsets, including mappings that ensure standardization for use downstream for data analysis, rendering in a product view, and FHIR-based data exchange.
For example, to accurately inform predictive analytics solutions, data scientists must ingest massive volumes of clinical data to help predict optimal therapies for patients. However, different source systems code data differently, and when aggregated, it’s difficult to make sense of it. In fact, the Harvard Business Review reports that cleansing data before training a predictive model takes up to 80% of data scientists’ time. 2
Embedding a terminology management solution with your product supports semantic interoperability between systems, ensuring data is integrated in a safe way that holds its meaning with appropriate context.
Data quality can help you deliver the results your customers expect
Having a solid foundation for data quality can help you deliver value to your healthcare customers for improving data quality and analytics, enabling better patient experiences, and improving financial outcomes.
By integrating identity and semantic solutions into your products, you’ll be able to not only demonstrate your understanding of — and ultimately tackle — the challenge of poor data quality within your customers’ data ecosystems, you’ll also be able to differentiate your product in a competitive market by providing value that has a measurable impact on your customers’ performance and outcomes.
Ready to learn more about driving data quality discussions with your customers? Download the guide Be the data quality champion your customers need now.
Rhapsody health solutions are offered on the AWS Marketplace.
References:
- Product Leaders’ Top Actions to Grow Healthcare Provider Sales in 2023, Gartner
- If Your Data Is Bad, Your Machine Learning Tools Are Useless, Harvard Business Review