UPMC selected Microsoft to extract meaning out of more than 30 years worth of data that can be leveraged in the process of caring for patients.
Becker's spoke to Oscar Marroquin, MD, chief health care data and analytics officer of UPMC, and Chris Carmody, chief technology officer and senior vice president of UPMC, about what the new partnership with Microsoft will mean for the health system, its patients and clinicians.
How did the deal with Microsoft come together? Were there limitations with current technology?
Chris Carmody: We've been hitting up against a wall from a performance perspective.
We've had challenges of data acquisition, which everyone in healthcare has, especially when you're working with many different disparate systems.
Our main EHRs weren't built to extract data from our old environment or legacy environment and it would take about 240 minutes to execute the query, extract that data, process it, transform it and ingest it into our clinical analytics data warehouse.
On the new platform, we've gotten that down to about anywhere between 14 and 16 minutes.
So now we can deliver those insights closer and closer to the point of care, in real time, or near real time and that was very critical and important to us.
How did UPMC decide on Microsoft? Did UPMC consider other platforms?
CC: We arrived at the decision that Microsoft just matched our goals and our objectives and strategies with their technology and with their technology partners.
So we feel it's the best ecosystem for UPMC to accomplish those clinical and operational goals.
What challenges do you expect to face as you adopt/work with a new platform?
CC: From a technology standpoint, the biggest challenge when you adopt any new platform is training. Right now, our main focus is training current staff and teams as well as recruiting for different positions to help join our team so we can exponentially grow our abilities here.
Dr. Oscar Marroquin: How we do visualizations of the data or how do we build applications for self service use are always going to present some challenges of how do we get there, but we certainly feel that the gains that we're going to have with this new platform outweigh the small challenges that we will have to face.
We're also in a better position to handle challenges now that we have a more modern infrastructure tool that we're going to be working from.
How will this partnership with Microsoft help UPMC and, ultimately, providers and patients?
OM: Working together with Microsoft to leverage their technology is going to allow us to continue to advance the analytic work and digital initiatives that we have been doing.
This will ultimately allow us to deliver and meet the demands of our clinicians, researchers, operations and leadership.
It's also about scalability and our ability to accelerate what we're doing because the demand is growing.
Whether a patient is in a clinic or whether the patient is at home, we want to reach out to them in a digital way that allows us to provide asynchronous care and other things. And so all of those things that we aspire to do, are only possible if we have the right technical infrastructure underlying all of this.
What excites you most about the partnership with Microsoft?
CC: It gives us a real purpose and real meaning in the work that we do because it's contributing to how we can take care of and help take care of patients.
Everything we do centers around that patient, around that person. Whether they're a health plan member, whether they're walking in to see their primary care physician, or they're coming in, in an emergent situation. This work will enable us to do this all better in the future.
What challenges still remain regarding data and analytics?
OM: We are still going to continue to see technological challenges regarding data and analytics as more and more people want the data to be processed faster and broader.