Integrating and harmonizing healthcare data

The U.S. produces over 1.2 billion clinical documents each year, with that number expected to grow by 48% annually, according to a Stanford Medicine health trends report. As a result, many healthcare organizations face challenges in accessing, extracting, and preparing data for actionable and trusted information.

“There are silos of data across the different parts of the health system, whether it’s their enterprise resource planning (ERP), how they manage human resources (HR), payroll, the clinician systems, the lab systems, the operating room (OR) systems, and the billing systems. There’s a lot of data, but the data points don’t talk to each other,” explains Wilkes.

Health systems need the capability to transform all their data into actionable, meaningful information that identifies opportunities and creates roadmaps to improvement. And that’s where Premier, Inc. comes in.

By integrating and harmonizing data from its alliance of hospitals, health systems, and providers in VantageCloud on Azure, Premier, Inc. optimizes supply chain operations. Integrating medical supply purchasing levels with clinical data across multiple hospitals and providers, Premier, Inc. identifies potential spikes in inventory demand, such as regional or geographical outbreaks that warrant further supplies. This leads to predicting supply and inventory demand to prevent out-of-stocks. Insights are gained by harmonizing data across the broader healthcare landscape and don’t rely solely on a single hospital or provider to assess demand levels of medical supplies.

“Our mission is to improve the health of our communities. By working with our member hospitals within supply chains, we’re able to provide greater transparency and predict product shortages,” continues Wilkes.

Better clinical outcomes using Teradata ClearScape Analytics™

Premier, Inc. empowers its alliance with leading artificial intelligence (AI) driven healthcare analytics to improve quality of care and health outcomes. Premier Inc.’s PINC AI™ technology platform gives users the ability to access mission-critical clinical, financial, and operational data. With an open and connected platform for AI, Premier, Inc. members can further integrate supplemental data and bring their own analytical tools of choice as part of ClearScape Analytics.

“The fact that VantageCloud is an open and connected ecosystem is critically important to us. By not only leveraging the data that we have already integrated and harmonized on their behalf in VantageCloud, hospitals can also bring in and integrate supplemented data to then use their own business intelligence (BI) and AI tools,” explains Wilkes.

Teradata’s freedom of choice for analytics allows users to use the tools and languages with which they are most familiar, such as structured query language (SQL), Python, R, or others. This flexibility eliminates the need to learn proprietary tools or query languages with the use of industry-standard tools. Additionally, ClearScape Analytics and VantageCloud provide Premier, Inc. members with access to a library of curated content from Premier, Inc. and other health systems to create customized queries that fit their organization’s unique needs without learning to code.

In addition, Premier Inc.’s PINC AI™ solutions leverage insights from AI models to help deliver quality care, achieve health equity, and improve patient safety. 

“Our PINC AI™ Stanson clinical decision support (CDS) technology works with physicians in their workflow. So, while they have a patient at their bedside and they’re updating the electronic health record and talking with the patient, we’re running analytics in the background, leveraging the patient’s data and evidence-based research to present nudges back to the physician,” describes Wilkes. 

“They’ll make the call whether they use them or not, but we’re giving them suggestions based on what we’re seeing in the data and with evidence-based research to allow them to make the best clinical decision possible.”

Moreover, the analytics and data support care improvement by allowing hospitals to understand how they compare to others within the Premier, Inc. alliance.

“With the data we have, analytics let them understand where they reside against benchmarks. Premier, Inc.’s PINC AI™ analytics allow for measuring best practices in full transparency so they can see where they reside relative to each other to understand what they’re doing to get better. It’s a way for us to partner around a common problem, learn what’s working, and put those insights into our products so our full customer base can take advantage,” says Wilkes.