Data is the lifeblood of the modern world. But are data warehouses in healthcare being effectively used?
Data can help expedite decisions and drive innovation across every sector, and healthcare is no exception.
In fact, 30% of the world’s data volume is generated by the healthcare industry.
Every procedure or provided care results in the creation of important records such as:
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- Diagnostics
- Medical records
- Filling prescriptions
- Home care reports
Every patient’s interaction with care facilities or hospital admissions is painstakingly recorded as well.
Why Don’t Healthcare Executives Trust Their Data?
However, 80% of healthcare executives don’t fully trust their organization’s data. This may be due to poor classification, storage, or collection.
They feel that they don’t yet have the resources to use it effectively. Let’s learn more about the power of data warehouses in healthcare below.
Healthcare organizations are already starting to brainstorm new ways to expand their use of data.
Artificial intelligence has been one method to improve their business model.
AI has proved useful to document billing codes, medical charts, and visit notes, and 54% of organizations have adopted this use case.
Other practices include automating insurance prior authorization and creating care plans and process notes.
While all of these uses for AI have been beneficial, there are some significant areas where AI falls short.
Where Does AI Fall Short?
Generative AI requires a lot of data to be fed to produce relevant content.
But many of these public large language models, such as ChatGPT, may violate HIPAA privacy laws.
AI has some wonderful applications, but the best data sources come from the healthcare organizations itself.
The proper use of data can result in significant improvements for patient health.
For example, diagnosis can be completed faster and earlier, clinical efficiency can be tracked, and personalized medical plans can be curated.
These all lead to better treatment effectiveness and higher quality of care.
New therapies can also be released to the market on a faster basis, expanding patient access to revolutionary care.
However, data use can be a double-edged sword; if used improperly, data can have disastrous effects.
Incomplete patient records can result in misdiagnosis, medication errors, and heighten the risk of lawsuits and missed revenue.
One of the main barriers to effective data use is the need to collect data from more than one source.
There are many different options, including census, clinical, reimbursement, staffing, financial, and marketing data.
It can be extremely time-consuming for employees to track down all of these different sources.
Estimates claim that large organizations use an average of 367 software tools to keep track of all of their patients’ information.
This can waste up to 29% of the workweek for knowledge employees to find the correct sources of data.
This extremely slow information collection process can lead to manual errors and wrong decisions, and even open the door to privacy breaches.
Data Warehouses in Healthcare
Data warehouses are an effective method to store relevant data in the same place, because they serve as a centralized repository.
However, building it from scratch for a specific organization can take a very long time, between 12-36 months.
It also can be extremely expensive to build in-house, and require a high amount of technical expertise.
Therefore, it may be more cost- and time- effective to outsource the data warehouse to a third party.
This removes the need for updating and maintaining over 30 vendor integrations independently.
Third party solutions are also able to offer structured models that are already pre built and offer trusted experts to provide guidance every step of the way.
Most of these data warehouses are also fully SOC2 and HIPAA compliant, so they are built to handle sensitive healthcare information.
Best of all, the implementation of these third party warehouses only takes 90 days, offering a lightning-fast turnaround.
Do You Have a Better Understanding of Data Warehouses in Healthcare Now?
Healthcare is one of the most important industries serving our society, and every citizen stands to benefit greatly from expedited and efficient care.
Better data collection methods are one of more reliable ways to ensure this improvement of care comes to pass.
Data warehouses are a promising example of these new methods.
They can ensure the wasted time and energy from collecting data from disparate sources is soon to be a relic of the past.
Healthcare organizations should make the investment into these third party data warehouses.
They are designed to make data collection and recall a simple and painless process.
Source: MegaData