How a unified data view puts the patient experience first

Community healthcare systems and hospitals face the seemingly impossible task of doing more with less — limited funding and smaller staff.

How do these healthcare providers even begin to offer the kind of experience found at larger and more resourced medical centers?

Putting the patient front and center starts with an integrated data strategy.

Teaching hospital Hunterdon Healthcare set out to streamline inpatient and outpatient data with a single logon. Having a data solution that offered interoperability unified patient records across the health system.

Most importantly, patients found greater confidence in their provider and an all-around improved experience.

Even with best-of-breed IT systems in-house — including an electronic medical record (EMR) and 100+ applications — Hunterdon faced a major challenge before they partnered with us at InterSystems. The health system’s 60+ ambulatory facilities used a separate EMR with different patient identifiers. 

Without a single source of truth, matching inpatient and outpatient records was a challenge. Any information changes or missing data could result in duplicates and clinicians missing the data they need to care for patients.

But then Hunterdon automated patient matching with the help of HealthShare Patient Index. Physicians could now access patients’ entire history — including both inpatient and outpatient data — with a single click.

When a patient from our ambulatory Center for Advanced Pain Management is admitted, for example, it’s easier for hospital physicians to get the complete picture of the patient’s medication history.

Jagdish Patel, Manager of HIE and Data Engineering at Hunterdon Health

Automated record matching also benefited patients when Hunterdon partnered with another healthcare system to create a shared radiology imaging center. 

The joint venture could have brought additional data complexity — along with patient confusion and inconvenience. Instead, interoperability paved the way for the opposite experience. 

Patients now accessed the center’s radiology services within the system they were familiar with. Plus, they could rest assured that their imaging and results data flowed seamlessly to their patient record.

Handling the different patient identifiers and matching patients wouldn’t have been possible for us without HealthShare Patient Index.

Robin Deal, Manager of Data Integration Engineering at Hunterdon

Another improvement to the patient experience that wouldn’t have been possible without the power of interoperability? Risk alerts.

Hunterdon needed to seamlessly exchange outpatient and inpatient data between systems to inform hospital clinicians of patients’ medication history. Throughout their care, a patient might see multiple clinicians across both inpatient and outpatient services. But without an integrated view of the patient, those clinicians couldn’t make the best possible care decisions for the patient. 

Risk alerts initiated through HealthShare Patient Index and HealthShare Unified Care Record start the data exchange between both inpatient and outpatient EMRs.

Here’s how that might look.

When a patient participates in an outpatient pain management program, tracking that data creates an alert in the inpatient EMR. The emergency department (ED) system also receives the alert so that ED clinicians know the patient’s status in case of future admission and can care for them accordingly.

This data exchange among the systems ensures that patient history is available to anyone who cares for the patient. Physicians can correctly oversee medication and pain management — with the patient’s needs at the forefront.

What we’ve done here gives patients more confidence in their providers and ensures that pain is managed inside and outside the hospital in the best way for each individual.

Jagdish Patel, Manager of HIE and Data Engineering at Hunterdon Health

Risk alerts don’t just keep clinicians in the loop. They let the data advocate for the patient, letting them know that their clinicians have the full story and that their care will fit their needs.

Interoperability lets community hospitals like Hunterdon do more with less — more efficient and seamless interactions with less complication for patients. 

And patient-focused outcomes are what digital transformation is all about.

• How are you putting patients at the center of the care experience? What challenges is your healthcare organization still facing? Let me know in the comments.
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Thank you in advance for joining me on this journey. I’m excited to see where leading with service takes all of us together.

Respectfully,
John