TMCnews Featured Article

For data-heavy industries, it has always been more than a little bit of a headache to keep track of, store, quantify, organize and retrieve this data. The healthcare industry – perhaps one of the most data-intensive industries in the world – has been struggling with this problem since time immemorial. Patient records, once stored in folders in a doctor’s office, might today be geographically spread all over offices, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, emergency rooms and walk-in clinics, testing facilities and labs. Since missing information can put patients at risk, it’s critical that health care facilities account for all this information correctly.

But it’s about more than patient care. The healthcare industry is heavily regulated for data security and patient confidentiality. Healthcare organizations need to be able to use modern technology to share information, but they need to ensure they are sharing it correctly.

Data analytics have been a boon to the healthcare industry. Healthcare Informatics (News - Alert) Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland recently interviewed John Kravitz, Geisinger Health System’s VP of information technology and associate CIO; and Alistair Erskine, M.D., the company’s chief clinical informatics officer. The goal was to determine how the Danville, PA-based healthcare network is using technology to manage patient communications and information.

The company’s data analytics solution is being used to identify patient care gaps, said Dr. Erskine.

“[It] encompasses both inpatient and outpatient data, with Geisinger and non-Geisinger patients across the system,” he said. “But it also brings in costing data and other data. The [solution] helps us look at quality-of-care gaps, and create bundles, as for ProvenCare. So the care gaps could be something like, my diabetic patients have not had eye exams, for example, or getting a micro albumen, or figuring out why the hemoglobin a1c for particular groups of patients is not where it should be, or any number of things. But what’s unique about it is that it identifies care gaps, and matches the data with a human who calls up the patient and creates an intervention. So closing care gaps is both an automated data piece and also a human-facilitated piece.”

It’s a way to mix communication with patients with care data to foster the best possible outcomes. The company also uses dialers to save time and improve the likelihood of connection with patients.

“We have predictive dialing; and if someone picks up live, it transfers them to a live person,” Kravitz told Healthcare Informatics. “And it may even be a biology/pathology result that’s malignant, and it helps us use automated tools to intervene or act. And because we have some claims through our health plan, and our population is fairly stable, we’re able to do a lot of analysis on those patients. And anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of our health plan members are seen by our providers, so then we have all our clinical information to do data analytics on them.”

Improved management of data and communications has uncovered some problems that Geisinger has been able to fix. Erskine told HCI that one lesson being learned is that a lot of providers are finding out that the level of care management they thought they had wasn’t as good as they had believed. Thanks to better data analysis and improved channels of communication, the company is in a good position to fix these problems.