The Medical University of South Carolina’s enterprise data warehouse is helping the academic medical center reduce chart abstraction time for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) measures.

In their education session 3, “R U MU Savvy? How an Enterprise Data Warehouse Moves You Toward Meaningful Use,” Dan Furlong, PMP, MBA, CPHIMS, project management officer for MUSC, and Lynn Garrett, PMP, product manager for TELUS Health Solutions, discuss how data warehouses can be leveraged to achieve meaningful use.

For MUSC, the deployment has created efficiencies in the form of an overall 15 percent reduction in cart abstraction time and an inter-rater reliability of at least 75 percent compared with manual abstraction, according to Furlong. Other important benefits include an increase in patient safety.

The data warehouse enables dashboards to be deployed to monitor best practices in such areas as diabetes and infections. The seemingly never-ending data streams can help create various registries, including cancer, transplant and hypertension. All of these efforts can help healthcare providers meet various meaningful use criteria.

MUSC developed a “Little Big Bang Theory” for the implementation of data-warehouse applications, which essentially focused on starting with a realistic goal, or starting small. Its roadmap incorporated planning for scaling, change, bumps and setbacks, and also success.

By starting small, the academic medical center was able to prioritize without getting bogged down on minutiae, achieve small wins that kept everyone on course, be nimble enough to react to changing business and clinical objectives.

Achievable small-scale projects also means new projects can be initiated and completed, which could build more wins, momentum and resources for the next project.

Getting one interested leader on board can get the ball rolling, but it’s important to keep leadership engaged and to find ways to explain simple concepts to leadership. Projects should be set up to foster innovation and be open to testing new concepts.

Another critical component is finding a vendor to partner with to share both risks and successes. Finally, Furlong and Garrett encouraged bragging about the successes, which will spawn enthusiasm for the next health IT initiative that leverages the data warehouse.