Kathy Gibson reports from InterSystems Virtual Summit 2021 – Healthcare systems have always been important, but extracting useful insights has become more critical than ever over the last 18 months.

InterSystems aims to help its healthcare customers gain true value from the data in their operational systems, says Don Woodlock, head of healthcare at InterSystems.

This journey to gaining insights began with organisations first maximising their existing operational systems, with some companies going further by extracting data into a data warehouse or data lake where they could perform some analysis.

InterSystems aims to rather provide an end-to-end solution that brings together healthcare content plus the raw engine technology that helps to solve the analytics issues.

The solution has five components: pipeline services; harmonisation services; a data model; user access service; and actionable insights.

“The first four are about bringing data out of operational systems; with the final step about getting insights back to users and the source systems,” Woodlock explains.

 

Pipeline services

Whether an organisation has multiple instances of the same EHR, multiple vendors, or just need to bring together the hundreds of data silos that permeate the average healthcare organisation, they can all be connected through InterSystems’ standards-based data ingestion pipeline.

Adaptors bring data in using interoperability standards such as HL7 FHIR R3 and R4, HL7v2, CCDA, and x12, accessed via REST, SOAP, SFTP, and other protocols.

 

Harmonisation services

Preparing data for use requires deduplication and normalisation, plus mapping to standard terminologies and populating a longitudinal “golden record”.

The HealthShare Analytics Solution includes all of these capabilities. It also can provide patient identification and matching, terminology enhancement, and deidentification services.

 

Healthcare data model

The HealthShare Analytics Solution provides a curated healthcare data model and dictionary for use by report writers, analysts, and data scientists. This patient-centric data model spans multiple domains including, but not limited to clinical, claims and social determinants, and can be expanded to revenue cycle management.

The data model is extensible to support the organisation’s unique requirements, including non-patient data sources.

 

User access services

Organisations can accelerate time to insight by providing data analysts, business analysts, and data scientists from across the organisation with centralised access to a populated healthcare data model for analysis and visualisation.

A universal semantic layer and data virtualisation enables access without the need to expose complex data structures, tables, or relationships. Analysts, for example, can access data through their business intelligence tool of choice, such as Microsoft Excel, Power BI, or Tableau.

At the same time, data scientists can easily leverage machine learning tools and environments such as InterSystems Integrated ML, DataRobot, and H2O.ai.

 

Actionable insights
“A lot of analytics stop at the previous step,” says Woodlock. “But I say the job is not yet done. You still need to make the data usable and actionable in the workflow.”

InterSystems closes the loop by sending results back into your source systems and workflows. This means users can deliver insight at the point of decision, to the right person at the right time.

IT can deploy predictive models to administrators and caregivers within their normal operational and clinical workflows via dashboards, electronic medical record systems, or realtime alerts.

FHIR, CDS Hooks, and other application programming interfaces (APIs) can be leveraged to make insights available within apps by patients, partners, and policymakers to optimise decision-making and inform action.

 

New features

InterSystems has introduced new systems into its healthcare analytics solutions.

Woodlock explains that the TrakCare innovation toolkit helps to convert systems of record to systems of transformation and allows organisations to leverage data for the types of innovation the move business forward.

InterSystems Client Connection is a community platform that allows Trakcare customers to engage with each other, share best practices and have discussions with one another. InterSystems will also post information on the forum.