4 Use Cases for Data Integration in Modern Healthcare

Blog: The Tibco Blog

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Modern hospitals adopt new technology with agility—you’d be amazed at all the new technologies available to doctors. However, healthcare data has not benefited from the same forward-thinking strategy.

Even the most tech-driven institutions can struggle to achieve efficient data integration and management. A typical healthcare data management system provides access to in-house data but may not do a great job aggregating all sources and delivering unified data to end-users.

With the right solutions, you can support data-driven decisions and improve frontline care with a better data integration strategy.

Why You Need Data Integration

Data integration joins data from disparate sources into a unified set to enable better business intelligence. For example, healthcare integration techniques can pull data from different electronic health record (EHR) systems into one comprehensive source—providing practitioners with all the information they need for accurate, standardized care.

The amount of healthcare data waiting to be leveraged is enormous. With each visit, care providers collect a patient’s personal information and medical history, which they can use to identify effective preventative strategies, eliminate inefficiencies, and save costs.

Poor data integration can lead to incomplete and fragmented patient information, ultimately resulting in compromised care and wasted critical resources.

Three Capabilities to Achieve True Integration

True data integration results in dynamic, 360-degree views of patients and their data for real-time decision-making. To achieve this, you need the following capabilities:

Adopt a common healthcare canonical model: Bringing disparate source data content into a single, comprehensive model increases analytics’ staff productivity.
Integrate data quality and master data management (DQ/MDM) so that data can be trusted and the different identification schemes for patients, providers, facilities, and organizational units across the sources are tied to masters. All transactional clinical and financial data is then connected to them.
Harmonize disparate codes that represent common concepts across the systems. This capability also improves productivity by dimensionalizing analytics. Additionally, harmonizing proprietary medication and lab result codes unlocks the doors to a vast quantity of industry metadata.

Together, these three capabilities deliver a 360-degree view of your patients’ healthcare journey.

Data Integration Use Cases for Healthcare

Deploying data integration can illuminate data gaps and improve accessibility among doctors, patients, and third-party service providers. With a unified patient view, you can improve healthcare across many use cases:

Crisis Response

The pandemic underscored the need for systemwide data access. During the recent pandemic, healthcare providers desperately needed a high-level view of what was happening within their hospitals.

However, without systems that could effectively integrate data from different sources, leaders struggled to manage the pandemic proactively. Instead, they had to respond based on disjointed data that could not show how changes in one area affected other areas.

To provide comprehensive data access for end-users during a health crisis, care providers can use data integration solutions to combine information from appropriate sources and feed it into a central cloud-based solution. This platform could serve as the primary source of truth to drive crisis-response decisions among caregivers, regulators, law enforcers, and patients.

Drug Discovery

Drug development is not a straightforward process. It takes a significant amount of time, research, and monetary investment before a new drug can launch. Statistical reports indicate that the cost of bringing a drug to market is $1.3 billion on average.

Data integration can enable researchers to access relevant information from different datasets and use it to advance research in drug development and target validation. Drug developers can quickly access data from trusted, disparate datasets. From this information, they can build on already existing research and avoid the costly mistakes that previous developers made.

Accurate Diagnostics

Diagnosis is a crucial part of a patient’s care cycle because it determines treatment. However, diagnoses are far from perfect. Diagnostic errors can be attributed to 80,000 deaths in the US every year. While data exists to run tests and accurately inform diagnostics, results are heavily undermined by ineffective data integration.

With solid data integration, health organizations can acquire data to create holistic views of patients and deploy personalized treatments. Rather than solely relying on their own records, practitioners can build diagnostics informed by the complete history of a patient. A comprehensive view can even enable them to draw links between fundamentally different symptoms, provide an accurate diagnosis, and administer adequate treatment.

Public Health

Patient data integration was instrumental in determining high-risk patients during the pandemic. Institutions realized they could pool their data to identify people whose medical histories put them at greater risk of becoming gravely ill. With this information, they were able to create predictive models and take a more proactive approach to the pandemic.

Healthcare providers recognize the potential of data integration for public health management. Scattered data from offline hospital databases, websites, wearables, and mobile apps can be integrated to provide deeper insights into the health needs of a community. Care professionals and governments can then take preventive measures to deliver timely improvements and avert possible crises.

Embrace Data Integration Today

As data emerges as the top resource in healthcare, institutions must make it readily available. Data cannot reach its full potential if end-users are struggling to access it at the critical point of decision-making.

Quinte Health Care and Queensway Carleton Hospital are two healthcare organizations that have already digitally transformed for the better, reporting a savings of $10 million dollars and 80 percent of time devoted to improvement projects, respectively.

Ready to access comprehensive and trusted sources of information to deliver data insights in real time? Check out TIBCO’s Solutions for Healthcare and get started on your transformation to a modern healthcare organization.

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