How CIOs can turn flawed data into 'healthy data'

Healthcare IT News sat down with the doctor because he offers a unique perspective, being on the informatics side for 20 years and being on the patient care side and seeing first-hand how many patients are unaware of what is happening behind the scenes with their data – and ultimately that flawed data can lead to errors in decision making. While doctors should make better decisions based on a historic dataset about a patient, we make life-and-death decisions based on episodic test results, the current set of symptoms and current complaints. As a doctor, I should be able to trend how a patient's complaints, medications and test results reported to another doctor three months ago correlate with complaints, medications and test results today in my office. Today we cannot easily electronically trend this patient's test results because most likely the other doctor ordered tests at a different laboratory. These results are not electronically shared, patient identity is poorly established, and each lab uses a different set of codes for tests. Achieving electronic data sharing is hard, but when this data contains poorly identified patients, many complications arise when managing entire populations or individual patients. Duplicated patients are created most often, resulting in incomplete data for each patient, hindering point-of-care decision making and quickly invalidating population-wide analytics. Incorrect decisions caused by wrong information in a patient's chart is one of the more frequent causes of medical errors, resulting in incalculable suffering and high cost of litigation in healthcare. Q. How can healthcare provider organization CIOs get rid of flawed data and make data healthy? After the data sources have been connected, healthcare data quality must continue with two additional steps: patient identity resolution by establishing a single record for each patient and normalizing the data to achieve meaningful reporting. Even when all records are placed into the right electronic patient chart, the coding principles in healthcare are not rigorous enough to correlate data coming from disparate doctors, hospitals, laboratories and imaging centers. Even when all records are placed into the same electronic patient chart, the coding principles in healthcare are not rigorous enough to correlate data coming from disparate doctors, hospitals, laboratories and imaging centers