What value does "Data Lake" bring to ever-increasing data streams in healthcare?

Healthcare reimbursements and increasing consumerism have made it critical for healthcare executives to understand and unlock the power of their organizations’ data. Health systems are progressively leveraging their data to eliminate waste, enhance efficiency, and deliver upgraded patient service. For public or private fee-for-service organizations, the market demands competition on clinical, financial, and service outcomes founded on the data examined by providers, payers, patients, and purchasers.

All these factors congregate to the chief information officer’s (CIO) desk as information systems departments are tasked with implementing data in a suitable manner to meet new operational requirements. A majority of CIOs are confronted with new data warehousing overhaul efforts, as their current practices are hampering their adaptation to new payment models and needs.

For successful data implementation, CIOs need to verify that their new data lake is an efficient investment for their executive processes. To deliver value, a data lake requires specific applicability to clinical and business problems. Healthcare organizations require a complete data management system that extracts competitive outcome metrics and delivers actionable insights for them.

Redundant data sources propel high maintenance and operations costs for care organizations. Legacy electronic medical records (EMRs) offer inefficient workflows and a poor user experience that decreases the efficiency of care management, patient appointments, follow-ups, and other care operations. Hospital leadership requires solutions with a strong data lake foundation that rationalize their information technology (IT) expenditures, simplify regulatory reporting for staff, and address the evolving needs of end-users. Here, rationalized and aggregated data sources in a data lake save considerable IT and management costs, and facilitate a wide range of reporting requirements for health systems with bolt-on solutions.

What is a data lake?

A data lake is a consolidated repository for data that allows organizations to research, integrate, and analyze large quantities of information at once. Healthcare organizations may use it to execute clinical analytics using patient data stored in the electronic health record (EHR), or they may refine their financial forecasting by drilling into business intelligence and revenue cycle analytics using claims and billing codes.

Innovaccer’s Data Lake is a connected care framework that centers all healthcare information around individual patients and helps generate actionable information at all points of care. For health systems, it presents a cost-effective business strategy that offers simplified analytics support, accelerated implementation and speed to return on investment (ROI), substantial back-end automation, and a flexible structure that allows the organization to adapt to evolving competitive and regulatory pressures and evolve into the next generation of analytics.

Healthcare organizations CIOs, CMIOs, and CNIOs are shifting to these new systems to better understand and deploy analytics and adapt to new data tools. This update from traditional warehouse strategies is reinforced with the availability of new data sources and new data tools. Let’s understand the benefits that Innovaccer’s Data Lake brings to healthcare organizations:

• Data Lake is an integrated, holistic platform that assists all analytics and decision support requirements for health systems. It contains an acceptable set of vertical capabilities that align perfectly with the system’s core service lines and ancillary care departments.

• It aggregates patient data from a wide range of clinical and non-clinical sources into a single platform. Data Lake enables health systems to unlock the true power of their data by performing analysis alongside a series of measures like expenditure, utilization, et. al. for truly actionable insights. These insights direct health systems to high performance in value-based metrics.

• It efficiently dissolves department silos with a horizontally-integrated framework that connects procurement, utilization, and outcomes data in an automated fashion to yield strategic insights and actionable intervention opportunities for health systems.

• It works with the next-generation analytics platform to take complete care of the health system’s data governance requirements, as well as the downstream analytics needs for efficient execution of care programs.

• To meet the analytic requirements of health systems, Innovaccer’s Data Lake does the heavy lifting to generate intuitive and engaging visuals for departmental and clinical end-users, IT analysts, and database administrators. This empowers health systems with data-driven decision making.

• It helps health systems with simplified reporting by leveraging standard and custom reports to draw insights and ease the burden of reporting on their staff.

• It allows hospitals to create customized “unified patient records” and consume them as application programming interfaces (APIs) for network development and multiple care applications.

How can you accelerate your digital transformation journey with Innovaccer’s Data Lake and key accelerators?

Our Data Lake is foundational to an ROI framework that minimizes the health system’s investments by realizing cost-saving opportunities within IT infrastructure. It is the most cost-effective data archiving solution that deploys a variety of use cases to realize productivity, efficiency, and quality impact for physicians, care coordinators, and healthcare leadership.

While most data platforms have predefined formats for data ingestion, Innovaccer works directly with the hospital’s source systems to integrate data into its proprietary Data Activation Platform (DAP). Our solution provides end-to-end ownership of healthcare data management and its applications.

Our Data Lake architecture provides 200+ pre-built connectors to allow hospitals to onboard and test data in just twenty weeks. With intelligent algorithms, our platform delivers deep AI- and ML-powered predictive insights to drive the hospital’s operations. Let’s understand the key accelerators on Data Lake that work to transform healthcare data for clinical and business insights:

1. ETL and Interfaces: Over the years, Innovaccer has worked with several most commonly used source data systems across health systems – EMRs, claims data, data from bedside medical devices, personal health devices, remote patient monitoring devices, finance & supply chain systems and third-party data such as social determinants of health, pollution, etc. With a deep understanding of each source system and aggregating data from multiple sources, Innovaccer has built 85+ pre-built connectors with these sources that automate most of the ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) steps and solve the data aggregation problem in record time.

2. Data Quality Validation: Ingested data is run through DAP’s Data Quality Assessment Tool (DQT) to identify gaps and errors in the ingested data and generate a “Data Quality Report.” This report contains a detailed qualitative analysis of the specified dataset, including missing and duplicate values and deviations from coding standards for 62 data fields such as clinical, demographic, and financial codes.

3. Unified Data Model: After the data quality check, DAP’s pipelines transform the raw data by governing the end-to-end data flow and performing the required standardizations, modifications, and other operations to ensure that only clean and accurate data is processed. Data is then mapped to DAP’s master schema and stored in the integrated Data Lake.

As Innovaccer aggregates data from multiple sources, health systems can create longitudinal records for patients from various data sources. Innovaccer’s master patient index (MPI) algorithm creates a unique MPI for each patient and allows providers to identify duplicates by matching the MPIs across patients, thereby minimizing duplicate patient records.

Processed and clean high-quality data, available in the integrated data lake, can be accessed through Innovaccer’s library of pre-built APIs, leveraged to power custom-built applications. Later, DAP’s Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) engine helps uniquely identify members (patients) across disparate healthcare IT systems, which is imperative for any downstream applications. DAP employs our proprietary Bayesian-based flexible matching algorithm that produces more than 95% accuracy every time.

4. API Management: DAP’s extensive API library includes the complete FHIR API library. Innovaccer is also working on creating a library of APIs that extends far beyond patient lists. For example, creating provider credentialing APIs helps determine providers’ most current directories within a few API calls each month.

5. Visualization: Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform also comes with InGraph, its own business intelligence (BI) tool that accelerates the ability to derive insights from the health systems’ data. The standard measures and dashboards help providers augment their business intelligence needs and deliver quick wins. Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform allows health systems the flexibility to operate any SQL/AI/ML workbench of their choice to drive their analytics and power their algorithms. The data platform also allows providers to derive insights from their data and save it within the data model for further consumption by downstream applications and BI tools.

Stay tuned to learn more about how Data Lake has helped large organizations pick pace on their digital transformation journey, and build impactful solutions on it within weeks! We would love to hear from you, write to us at team@innovaccer.com