DANVILLE, PA – Geisinger Health System and IBM will collaborate on the development of a data-mining project that will draw on information gleaned from Geisinger's electronic health record system to identify clinical trends and best practices in order to improve patient outcomes.

The centerpiece of the new relationship will be the Clinical Decision Intelligence System (CDIS), which will “drive quality of care, administrative efficiency, and innovation across a number of fronts,” according to IBM Global Solutions Healthcare Executive Brett Davis.

Based on open standard technology, CDIS will be the foundational project in a major investment in Geisinger’s infrastructure that will enable a variety of different applications.

“This is an outgrowth of our commitment to health IT,” said Ronald Paulus, MD, Geisinger’s chief health information technology officer. “Geisinger has had EHRs for 10 years, but we wanted to be able to organize our data in a way that would allow us to gain more clinical insight. We didn’t have the resources to develop this internally, but during discussions with IBM we recognized we shared a vision about the need to integrate real-time clinical data with historical data.”

Paulus noted that Geisinger has invested more than $70 million to date in its EHR system, but did not reveal a specific financial commitment to this new initiative.

“We’ll be involving stakeholders from different constituencies across the health system,” Paulus said. “But we’ll begin with the clinical areas, and starting there we’ll build an architecture that will allow us to do different things.”

One example of how CDIS might be used is in cardiac risk projection. New decision support and analytical tools will allow physicians to compare clinical information about a current cardiac patient with the outcomes of previous patients of the same age and health status.

“What we’re beginning to see is the development and maturation of an analytical environment that can ultimately be used to drive innovation in the healthcare system,” said IBM’s Davis. “Geisinger is trying to create a healthcare analytics system that is a ‘closed loop,’ which generates quality data and then returns that data to the patient care process.”

Paulus said that Geisinger expects that the CDIS system will produce tangible results by December 2008.

“This will provide us with a treasure trove of analytical information,” he said. “It will help us determine which patients might qualify for clinical trials and will help drive utilization of evidence-based standards. It will allow us to build on locally-derived best practices.”