Archive for August, 2009

Siloed Incentives and a Siloed System Require a Patient Registry

Siloed provider and payer incentives match the siloed healthcare system. For example, financial penalties often appear one sided and competitors are expected to share data with each other. This environment makes it difficult to establish a sense of urgency for HIT adoption.

Building your Health Information Exchange Business Plan: A Checklist

We are often asked to provide thought leadership about the key components of a Health Information Exchange business plan. Based on years of experience, here’s our list of the elements we believe to be critical to effective, sustained HIEs.

Kicking Down the Right Door: Multi-Domain MDM

MDM is starting to catch on within public sector organizations tasked with identifying, targeting and mitigating threats to citizens. The challenge today, however, is cutting through many technologies in the marketplace that claim to provide MDM capabilities but in reality can only support bits and pieces of what true MDM is all about.

Composite Entities: Multi-Domain MDM in Action

When meeting with analysts and thought leaders, multi-domain master data management was a hot topic. I believe it’s fair to say that everyone agreed the term “multi-domain” has many meanings, with no clear consensus on the definition. We used these discussions to introduce a different notion in the conversation – the notion of composite entities.

Are Personal Health Records (PHRs) the Solution to Data Exchange?

Perhaps in a couple decades, personal health records (PHRs) will play a major role in aiding a person’s control of their own healthcare and in enabling coordination of care. But for the foreseeable future, PHRs will play only very small role, at best.

What Are You Waiting For?

When it comes to media coverage of the ARRA meaningful use program, and what healthcare organizations are doing to prepare, most of the coverage has been about organizations waiting to see what happens when the final requirements are released. I don’t understand what they are waiting for.

Tap Me on the Shoulder…

Chatting to the CIO of a major regional police force recently, he mentioned ‘what I really need is a computer system that will tap me on the shoulder with the knowledge of 6000 police officers’. This got me thinking about what would actually be needed and I came up with the following:

Data Hubs: Master Data Repository or Master Data Service?

Data hubs are popular architectural constructs of the enterprise data management solutions of this decade. Even though the term “data hub” has been used extensively over the last five or six years, many IT professionals use this term as a new word for a more traditional Operational Data Store of the 1980s and 90s.

Meaningful Use & Data Quality

With all the discussion around “meaningful use” and ARRA funding, there are multiple, competing definitions. As it applies to an electronic health record (EHR), though, “meaningful use” is usually characterized in several different ways. Data quality remains one of the most important components to consider.

Choice Hotels Provides Enhanced Services for 15 Million Customers

Choice Hotels leveraged an MDM solution to make the most of customer data from its eight distinct hotel brands, personalizing experiences for a million guests each month while tracking loyalty across properties.