6 Steps To Health Information Superiority

Jeffrey Edgell | Government Health IT | August 13, 2013

IT enterprises must respond rapidly to queries and be in a position to take action based on data and information that are accurate, understandable and timely. This demand extends to all areas of professional and personal use including the health environment.

Consider the instance of the acute patient in need of treatment outside of her provider network whose medical history is contained in numerous disparate systems. Think, too, of the consumer simply trying to make a decision on buying a healthcare product online and making comparisons. In both examples, the end user requires actionable, comprehensible, correct and current information. A failure in any area may ultimately result in poor decision making, possibly with life-or-death ramifications.

Users must have the capability to request data from any system that houses needed information — even if stored in formats that the host system never anticipated — and receive them in a manner that integrates properly with that host system. Historically, a user in either scenario described above would be challenged to determine where the required data were stored and how to access, translate and integrate them with other data being collected.