Interoperability was supposed to connect healthcare, enable data sharing and allow organizations to derive value from their massive amounts of data. Yet in most health systems, data remains fragmented and, in many cases, unusable. Instead, health systems incur hidden costs that undermine clinical quality and financial performance.
Connected vs. coordinated data
Large health systems typically have dozens of silos containing enormous amounts of data — but disconnected, that data is not very useful.
“The issue is that providers get so much data they are unable to make sense of it,” said Gurpreet Singh, Senior Vice President of Interoperability Strategy and Solutions at ELLKAY. “The data is duplicative, not normalized and inconsistent.”
To create holistic data and a longitudinal patient record, health systems have attempted to connect their data by building a centralized data repository such as an enterprise data warehouse.
While centralizing and connecting data is essential, it is not enough. Making data useful for informed decision-making requires coordinating and orchestrating it.
“Connection is the technical aspect of bringing data together,” Mr. Singh said. “Coordination and orchestration is making the data useful.”
Health IT’s biggest hidden cost
When data is not coordinated and provided to clinicians in a useful way, it creates enormous hidden costs. “The unmanaged gap between IT systems and data silos is the biggest hidden cost in health IT,” Mr. Singh said.
According to Nick Shepard, Assistant Vice President of Data Orchestration at Tacoma, Washington-based MultiCare, these hidden costs take several forms: compromised safety that can occur when clinicians make decisions without a complete patient record, clinician time wasted sifting through data, duplicated services and payer denials that mount when required billing data is missing. “Whether it’s an extra prescription or an additional MRI, you have costs from duplication that can occur when data is not coordinated,” Mr. Shepard said.
Costs also mount during transitions of care — when a patient arrives at the hospital without records from their physician, or when a discharged patient’s community physician cannot access information from the hospitalization
Data orchestration at MultiCare
MultiCare is a health system with 13 hospitals and more than 300 primary, urgent, pediatric and specialty care locations across Washington. The system once had approximately 50 disparate data sources.
To help providers make better, faster decisions, MultiCare needed to exchange data among its silos and aggregate it into an enterprise data warehouse. “The data in those formerly siloed locations is now consolidated,” Mr. Shepard said.
But leaders realized that just connecting data was not enough; they needed to use analytical power to make this data useful to clinicians in real-time.
“People need that information at their fingertips,” Mr. Shepard said. “By enabling an end-to-end orchestration layer, we bring the power of those disparate data sources into the centralized data repository and convert it into usable data at the point of care.”
Investing in data readiness and orchestration has improved MultiCare’s care quality across several metrics. It has also provided financial value by decreasing the organization’s payer denials and has helped leaders make more informed decisions.
“MultiCare has strategically made data part of its infrastructure, which is now a foundational layer across the organization,” Mr. Singh noted.
Creating data readiness for AI
Health system boards are approving AI initiatives, but these initiatives often aren’t producing the desired results. This is because AI is only as good as the data it uses — and many health systems lack a robust data foundation.
Connectivity, coordination and orchestration are needed to create an AI-ready data foundation. But achieving this requires the right talent, expertise, focus and mindset. Mr. Shepard acknowledged that most health systems have far too much going on to be experts in data orchestration on their own.
“For MultiCare, from a data orchestration perspective, ELLKAY has been essential,” Mr. Shepard said. “They haven’t been a vendor; we are working together in a real partnership.”
Learn more about ELLKAY’s Healthcare Data Orchestration Platform here.
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