Using a common standard makes for better measures

CHARLOTTE, NC – Premier healthcare alliance has partnered with Carmel, Ind.-based Clinical Architecture in an effort to normalize disparate healthcare data and help care providers better understand and use health information.

With new models of care delivery and reimbursement requiring data to be connected across hospitals, physician practices and other settings, officials say the partnership will better support performance measurement across the continuum of care.

With most health data not complete or connected, and with health indicators in different formats making comparison difficult, Clinical Architecture will aim to help the 2,500 hospitals and 81,000 other care settings of the Premier alliance normalize healthcare data from various sources to a common standard.

Premier is using Clinical Architecture’s automated data mapping capabilities to take disparate data from across Premier alliance members and map it to industry standard vocabularies. In cases where an industry standard doesn’t exist, data will be mapped into Premier alliance standards.

As a result, officials say, health systems will have a unified view of their healthcare performance. The resulting analysis will inform care decisions and improve clinical outcomes while supporting new care delivery models.

“Effectively caring for the health of a population requires IT systems to be interoperable, with data flowing seamlessly between them. Today, many healthcare systems don’t have the capabilities to do this,” said Keith J. Figlioli, senior vice president of healthcare informatics at Premier. “This partnership allows care givers to translate unique healthcare data across all providers so that predictive models can alert providers to opportunities for intervention – such as patients at risk for infection or other potential harm. Data interoperability like this is a key component to support an enhanced, integrated care delivery system.”

Clinical Architecture’s SYMEDICAL Server will be integrated to manage terminology normalization to support improved data interpretation and aggregation. SYMEDICAL Server’s Content Model Manager provides Premier with an unprecedented ability to create data relationships that enhance the understanding and usability of clinical information for clinicians at member organizations. These technologies leverage the power of health information as actionable data that helps health organizations succeed in the emerging environment of information-driven, value-based care delivery models.

“Through our partnership Premier members will have an unprecedented understanding of each patient’s medical information, allowing them to enhance care delivery, improve clinical quality measures, and enable data interoperability,” said Charlie Harp, CEO of Clinical Architecture. As a result, they will have the information they need to support an integrated care delivery program.”