ISTM660 Pepperdine University End of Chapter Application Case Paper
Question Description
End-of-Chapter Application Case
Smart Business Reporting Helps Healthcare Providers Deliver Better Care
Premier, which serves more than 2,600 U.S. hospitals and 84,000-plus other healthcare sites, exists to help its members improve the cost and quality of the care they provide the communities they serve. Premier also assists its members to prepare for and stay ahead of health reform, including accountable care and other new models of care delivery and reimbursement.
Challenge
As Premier executives looked to execute this vision, they recognized that the company’s existing technical infrastructure could not support the new model. Over the years, Premier had developed a series of “siloed” applications, making it difficult for members to connect different data sources and metrics and see the “big picture” of how to drive healthcare transformation. These platforms and associated software systems also lacked the scalability required to support the massive transaction volumes that were needed. At the same time, as Premier integrates data in new ways, it needs to ensure that the historic high level of data privacy and security is maintained. Moving forward with new technology, Premier had to confirm that it can isolate each healthcare organization’s information to continue to meet patient privacy requirements and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information.
Solution–Bridging the Information Gap
Premier’s “re-platforming” effort represents groundbreaking work to enable the sharing and analysis of data from its thousands of member organizations. The new data architecture and infrastructure uses IBM software and hardware to deliver trusted information in the right context at the right time to users based on their roles. Using the new platform, Premier members will be able to use the portal to access the integrated system for various clinical, business, and compliance-related applications. From a clinical aspect, they will have access to best practices from leading hospitals and healthcare experts across the nation and can match patient care protocols with clinical outcomes to improve patient care.
Applications on the new platform will run the gamut from retrospective analysis of patient populations focused on identifying how to reduce readmissions and hospital-acquired conditions to near–real-time identification of patients receiving sub-therapeutic doses of an antibiotic. Business users within the alliance will be able to compare the effectiveness of care locally and with national benchmarks, which will help them improve resource utilization, minimizing waste both in healthcare delivery and in administrative costs. Additionally, this integrated data will help healthcare organizations contract with payers in support of integrated, accountable care.
Premier’s commitment to improving healthcare extends beyond its member organizations. As part of its work, it teamed with IBM to create an integrated set of data models and templates that would help other organizations establish a comprehensive data warehouse of clinical, operational, and outcomes information. This data model, called the IBM Healthcare Provider Data Warehouse (HCPDW), can help healthcare organizations provide their staff with accurate and timely information to support the delivery of evidence-based, patient-centric, and accountable care.
Journey to Smarter Decisions
Fundamental to helping Premier turn its vision into reality is an Information Agenda strategy that transforms information into a strategic asset that can be leveraged across applications, processes, and decisions. “In its simplest form, Premier’s platform brings together information from all areas of the healthcare system, aggregates it, normalizes it, and benchmarks it, so it impacts performance while the patient is still in the hospital or the physician’s office,” says Figlioli, senior vice president of healthcare informatics at the Premier healthcare alliance. “We wanted a flexible, nimble partner because this is not a cookie-cutter kind of project,” says Figlioli. “Premier and IBM brought to the table an approach that was best of breed and included a cultural and partnering dimension that was fundamentally different from other vendors.”
The organization’s IT division is building its new infrastructure from the ground up. This includes replacing its existing x86 servers from a variety of hardware vendors with IBM POWER7 processor-based systems to gain greater performance at a lower cost. In fact, an early pilot showed up to a 50 percent increase in processing power with a reduction in costs. Additionally, the company is moving its core data warehouse to IBM DB2 pureScale, which is highly scalable to support the growing amount of data that Premier is collecting from its members. As part of Premier’s platform, DB2 pureScale will help doctors gain the inf