IHC Case Study

Content:

This week we only have one lecture about the research methods in healthcare IT and Intermountain Healthcare (IHC) is as a case study. IHC is an integrated health network which 21 hospitals and more than 140 clinics take part in. Physicians are employed by IHC to participate in health plans. The majority task of IHC is handling clinic data. There are 4 processes of IHC for using clinic data:


1. Determine the area of opportunity through clinic data

2. Construct clinical programs based on areas of opportunities

3. Design evidence-based and multidisciplinary approaches

4. Using informatics to define the solution

5. Measure the outcome

Much emphasis is put on the fourth step. Data integration and data normalization is the core of the architecture and they are realized by the integration engine and data dictionary. Integration engine is a server that coordinates the flow of clinical and administrative data within an enterprise. It determines the destination of the data received. Data dictionary improves integration engine with concepts in represent of clinical data so that the data can be transferred to common format. The one representation of the same concept not only decreases the development time of data but also the opportunities for errors. The data dictionary seems to be used as a standard, and actually it acts at the terminology level. Clinical data standards are very critical for the clinical data model. As what we have learned, the standards enable the communication of data from different systems and also decrease the costs. Nevertheless, standards are not perfect all the time. At this point, IHC is effective because it has its own data models which are ‘standard-aware’ but not ‘standard-dependent’, hence it will not have to change all the data when standards change. The clinic data repository combines the relational database, which is quick for finding the exact information such as blood pressure, and object repository which is fast for data retrieval so that it could be speedy. Besides the clinic data repository, there is Enterprise Data Warehouse in the architecture for the information other than the clinic data. Anyway, both repository and warehouse are for the purpose of better application of health IT.


Posted by  Xiaoxiao