"He who tames the data, wins."
So said Rasu Shrestha, MD, vice president of medical information technology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center during his keynote presentation at the Allscripts Client Experience Conference Aug. 22 in Chicago.
Across all care sites at UPMC, the data to be tamed amounts to 4.2 petabytes, or 4.2 trillion of the more-familiar kilobytes, or enough data to fill 936,600 standard DVDs.
Dr. Shrestha's goal in harnessing the data was to provide physicians and other providers with as much information as possible at the point of care, presented in a way that is both clear and useful. We wanted to "allow clinicians to be clinicians, not detectives," he said.
Under Dr. Shrestha's leadership, UPMC developed an application to incorporate the system's data mined from electronic health records and also relevant national standards for evidence-based care, making this important information available to clinicians.
"We put the data to work," said Dr. Shrestha. "And that's what intelligent healthcare is all about."
Phoenix Children's Hospital also put available data to work by developing an app to prevent unsafe medication dosages from being ordered through the hospital's e-prescribing system.
In his Aug. 22 keynote address, Vinay Vaidya, MD, vice president and CMIO of Phoenix Children's, described how the hospital's computerized physician order entry system was not preventing unsafe dosages.
Because patients at Phoenix Children's vary in size from premature infants to teenagers weighing more than 250 pounds, the hospital needed a dosing monitoring program able to account for a wide range of doses while still providing appropriate warnings when doses became dangerous.
"However, there was no plug and play pediatric app that could do this," said Dr. Vaidya.
Dr. Vaidya's team made their own, using existing hospital data pulled from the CPOE system to determine common dosing amounts for different medications and conditions, adjusting for patient weight and age, as well as "soft" and "hard" stops to be built into the ordering program.
The data additionally revealed the most common medications administered, allowing Dr. Vaiyda's team to prioritize the information most needed in the app.
For Beth Patino, information systems chief and administrative officer at Orlando (Fla.) Health, using data hinges on sharing data. She has taken significant steps in fostering the transmission of data within the health system to give each provider the most accurate version possible of the patient's health history.
"Our goal is to have a patient-first, clinically integrated system," said Ms. Patino, of the project to use dbmotion, recently acquired by Allscripts, to share data across all of Orlando Health's care settings. As a Pioneer Accountable Care Organization, Orlando Health knows the importance of using all available data to provide the best possible care for patients.
"We're integrating from in- and outpatient settings, from everywhere," says Ms. Patino. "It's all connected."
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