Mastering Data Management

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Knowing and leveraging relationships among patient data can improve care.

I’ve blogged earlier about the value of proactively managing provider data with a provider registry. Leveraging those existing relationships contained within the patient registry can improve communications and make it easier to do business with your providers.

But knowing key relationships among data can also improve patient care. Providers must understand when and where data needs to be routed while identifying the status of a caregiver acting on the patient’s behalf.

Health organizations need the ability to intelligently identify potential linkages that exist in the real world. By identifying these relationships, health organizations can better understand a patient’s true picture of care and communicate effectively with providers, regardless of where they practice.  Here are just a few examples:

Patient – Provider: Patients have primary care physicians or are treated by multiple members of a care team

Provider – Provider: Physicians are part of group associations and practices or have physician assistants

Provider – Organization: Physicians treat patients at hospitals, surgical centers and specialty clinics

Patient –Patient: A family unit is comprised of a household of multiple patients

These relationships can be identified using simple business logic to create a link in the data that can be leveraged to improve multiple processes, the overall quality of care and patient and provider satisfaction.

Having those relationships available to act upon to better facilitate information sharing could have extended the life of Fred Holliday.  In this tragic story, Fred’s wife, Regina, could not get her husband’s patient records in the hands of his doctors and nurses in time for proper treatment.

When Fred was transferred to a new hospital, Regina went to the medical records department of the first hospital and requested the records be transferred. In her words:

"I had gone down to medical records," Holliday says, "and they said, 'That'll be 73 cents a page and a 21-day wait.' I said, 'My husband is upstairs with Stage IV kidney cancer in your hospital and you're telling me I have to wait 21 days? Everything's on the computer. All you got to do is print it out and you're going to make me wait 21 days?' And they're like, 'Yeah, that's just the way it is.' I was floored."

Regina created a mural to tell the story to the rest of the world. Two key things should have happened:

• When Regina Holliday’s husband was transferred to a new hospital, the previous information should have been easily accessible, including his medication and allergy information, by identifying the location where he was most recently treated.
• By understanding that Regina has a spousal association with Fred in his incapacitated state, Regina may have had a chance to access the information herself to transport to Fred’s care team at the new hospital.

Defining these advanced relationships in data can also help when measuring quality of care which is top of mind for all healthcare providers with meaningful use metrics on the horizon.  Read more about key relationships in healthcare data and their applications in our new datasheet, Realize More Value From Your Data.