November 30, 2010 – Healthcare is changing, both in patient treatment and the government’s role in regulation and reimbursement. This makes the use of data, business intelligence, and analytics tools ever more important.
InformationWeek brought this information to our attention in their article, “How Healthcare Data Helps Caregivers.” Healthcare is entering a new phase of personalized medicine, where treatments are carefully tuned to individuals’ needs based on new technologies (such as extensive analysis of personal genomics and aggregate data), and large healthcare organizations are leading the way with business intelligence and analytics tools as a standard part of their financial and administration processes. However, they’re also starting to use these tools to improve their insight into the effectiveness of patient treatments, and to move toward the quality healthcare objectives and pay-for-performance metrics that are becoming an integral part of federal funding and reimbursement.
Master data management (MDM)–practices and tools that focus on achieving information consistency and quality throughout an organization – are becoming more popular. MDM practices typically involve using data quality, profiling, matching, and other tools. MDM is relatively new, but will be key in improving business intelligence because it improves data quality and consistency earlier, before data arrives in data warehouses.
Clear, consistent data is important for indexing and retrieving data. As we move into more business intelligence integrated in healthcare, remember that standards is what drives consistency. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
