Author: Renee Broadbent, VP, Information Technology
I have been in healthcare Information Technology for twenty-five plus years. In a very short time, healthcare technology has evolved considerably – from paper to Electronic Health Records, to achieving full data interoperability, well almost on this, but we’ve made great strides in this area because of the re-spark of Health Information Exchanges and improved regulatory support.
In the changing work of healthcare, the data we receive and share fuels the most basic and fundamental processes of our day-to-day activities. It is imperative then that we can connect to and with our patients, connect our patients to physicians, our physicians to payors and our payors to all to better enable the health of our patients, while maintaining the spend associated with it. As a result, when data is inaccurate or incomplete it creates all sorts of risk issues including inappropriate patient care resulting from a wrong diagnosis, incorrect payments, and lack of physician engagement. With the myriad of technologies and paper options, it seems physicians are spending less time with their patients and more time managing paperwork, systems, and metrics. But is that really where we need them focused? Physicians and other healthcare providers need the data to be easily and seamlessly integrated into their workflows. As an executive responsible for helping create and collect metrics of value for organizations, the primary focus must be on how this is helping the patient, the physician and if it is working overall.
The Information Technology (IT) and Medical Economics teams at SoNE HEALTH are exclusively focused on curating and aggregating data from clinical and other sources to help define a 360-degree view of a patient. We use specific, state of the art tools to ingest and organize data so our Population Health Management team can make information decisions about managing our populations AND help our providers manage as well. Our job is to make it easier, make the data available and easily digestible so they don’t have to worry about it.
We receive different types of data and collection of disparate data has never been an easy task. Data is often siloed in different repositories. Aggregating it takes time and effort. The data isn’t always in the ‘best shape’ and nor do you receive all the data you need. Our goal at SoNE HEALTH is to alleviate the ‘data worry’ to give our teams and providers what is needed to be effective.
In the end, regardless of our specific roles in a value-based organization, patients are the center of everything we do. Our shared purpose is to improve patient care. In the data world, that means giving providers and the population health team what they need to timely and seamlessly deliver patients the best care possible.
Author: Renee Broadbent, MBA, CCSFP
Author: Renee Broadbent, MBA, CCSFP
