The data puzzle
The digitisation of health records through the adaptation of computerised systems such as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) promises great advances for patient safety and clinical care. However, for many years the healthcare sector has focussed on implementing solutions to capture data and often ignored the need to make that data accessible. Without that access, we are not realising the full value and we are missing a substantial opportunity to apply learnings to future care delivery.
As healthcare organisations have approximately ten enterprise systems, usually with vastly different schemas and databases, the challenge to access consolidated and harmonised data is significant. Data is trapped in unconnected silos and incompatible systems through different standards and interfaces, and is difficult to exchange, process and interpret. In fact, the current healthcare landscape seems less characterised by “big data” but rather by a large number of disconnected small data.
Unlocking the power of data is similar to solving a complex puzzle. There is a multitude of pieces with different shapes and colour combinations – kind of like unstructured data as a collection of text, images and videos – and there is no way you can understand what the individual parts represent unless you are given the complete picture. To solve the puzzle, you need to put the pieces in context – aggregate and analyse the data in different ways, aligned with specific business needs.
Putting your pieces together
We like to think of the Alcidion data platform as the missing piece to the puzzle that allows organisations to make sense of their data and ensure it seamlessly fits together to provide greater understanding. Our vision for the solution is simple: to make all the locked data easily accessible and meaningful for analysis and decision-making. To achieve this, we have focused on creating a real-time, event-based architecture with a simplified healthcare schema to drive self-discovery.
Our data platform declutters the plethora of healthcare information by consolidating data in real-time. The data is sourced from thousands of tables across multiple disparate systems into a single, secured simplified healthcare-based schema. We do this with ease, due to our extensive knowledge of healthcare schemas and our breadth of experience in integration and data warehousing.
What does our data platform look like?
The solution includes:
- A modern architecture. Allows analytics applications to harness the power of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and natural language processing to underlying clinical and non-clinical data.
- Real-time data. Leverages replication/change capture and service bus techniques to support real-time streaming of data from source systems with no impact on production.
- Enables “out-of-box” plug-ins to integrate and extract data from clinical, patient, departmental, specialist, wearables, corporate and business applications for rapid deployment.
- Extensible virtual schema. Allows external applications to connect to the data platform using Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resource (FHIR) or Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) standards.
- Flexible hosting model. Designed to run on-premise, cloud on in a hybrid environment, with the ability to support high availability and data encryption (in-transit and at rest).
- Data Governance. Centred on a simplified healthcare-based schema defined to fully represent the various data domains and act as the enterprise data platform. A metadata management tool is provided for a common understanding of data structures.
- Designed to meet complex data privacy and security requirements. Allows dynamic de-identification of classified data for research and reporting purposes.
- Usability. Leverages highly scalable Microsoft technologies to store and disseminate the data, to support relational database querying for structured and unstructured data.
What models does your data platform facilitate?
Our data platform declutters the data swamp by logically arranging the data in a series of aligned models to allow stakeholders to make informed decisions.
Who can benefit from our platform?
Contrary to the industry hype, a modern, scalable and self-serviceable data platform is not out of reach. Our data platform has been driving real outcomes for major tertiary hospitals across clinical, operational, quality and safety and research areas. These include:
- Clinical and Patient Care. Supports a single longitudinal real-time view of the patient record by aggregating clinical and administrative data spread across multiple disparate systems.
- Hospital Operations. Aggregates financial, workforce, payroll, Patient Administration System (PAS), EMR and billing data to provide hospitals with a command centre to track historical, current and forecasted performance of key metrics and performance indicators
- Quality and Safety. Supports the integration and analysis of clinical incidents, occupational health and safety, quality control, risk registers and patient feedback.
- Research. Provides anonymised data insight capabilities to enable researchers to search and identify unknown data relationships in the patient population.
Why Alcidion?
Our real-time data platform and our vast healthcare experience is the ideal combination to help you integrate and analyse any amount or type of healthcare data you have. We have integrated and sourced data from many varied healthcare systems including major EMRs; multiple Patient, Community and Aged Care Systems; a cross-section of specialist and diagnostic systems such as Pharmacy, Theatre, Maternity, Cardiology; a range of Wearables to directly access patient collected data; and corporate systems such as General ledger, Payroll, Workforce and Clinical Costing.
Most of all, we understand that the management of healthcare data is a critical step towards a more connected and personalised health care system. Get in touch to solve your data puzzle today.
Vivek Krishnan, Head of Data & Analytics, Alcidion