Data Warehousing for Public Health
I had the pleasure to attend the PHIN conference in Atlanta last month. PHIN refers to the Public Health Informatics Network, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiative to improve the exchange of health data.
Recombinant was somewhat of a duck out of water in regards to public health because our focus revolves around clinical research and quality reporting through data warehousing. However, there were quite a few conversations where public health considered themselves uninvited to the table where data was being served.
Our knowledge about i2b2 and the capabilities of clinical systems for data management at hospitals led to some lively discussions and a handful of new opportunities. For example, the CDC has struggled to connect with chronic diseases and i2b2 would be an ideal way to connect to healthcare delivery networks with data management strategies around conditions such as coronary artery disease (CAD), hypertension, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
I met some vendors of interest that intersect with the clinical data warehousing world. A company in the Boston area called Diagnosis One has invested in developing a service including thousands of validated clinical decision support rules. We discussed combining their rule sets with the content that gets extracted and loaded into the Recombinant Data Trust. If anyone is interested in combining both a data warehouse and a privately maintained decision support rule library that is curated by physicians, give me a holler and we will pull together a collaboration with the folks at Diagnosis One!
Another vendor, Trizano, developed an open source public health application that could be a powerful tool linked with a data repository to handle the workflows for public health issues. Given that they focus on the beekeeper model like Pentaho, their licensing model should be compatible with research frameworks such as i2b2. Trizano’s tools might be another key application to drive value out of existing data sets.
The drive for meaningful use has also pushed a lot of interest in HIEs, thus these sorts of tools were well-represented at the conference. I was pleased to encounter the booths focused on IHE-HIE systems. The exhibitors clearly conveyed the message that an HIE doesn't ensure the sort of interoperability that is typically suggested. To ensure one will scale to a national level like an NHIN, the HIE must be implemented to satisfy IHE standards. Among the frustrating and somewhat odd outcomes from the rushed drive toward meaningful use by healthcare systems, is that many HIEs may never be interoperable because even the integration systems have put barriers in front of interoperability.
Based on the PHIN tour of HIE technology, it is now my preference to see more IHE-based HIEs. The Europeans and Canadians are rapidly adopting IHE, but in the United States we haven't wholeheartedly engaged in the standards and efforts at the healthcare-network level. Perhaps it isn't too late for national legislation or state initiatives to include requirements that satisfy international standards.
Dan Housman
Managing Director, Analytical Applications
Recombinant was somewhat of a duck out of water in regards to public health because our focus revolves around clinical research and quality reporting through data warehousing. However, there were quite a few conversations where public health considered themselves uninvited to the table where data was being served.
Our knowledge about i2b2 and the capabilities of clinical systems for data management at hospitals led to some lively discussions and a handful of new opportunities. For example, the CDC has struggled to connect with chronic diseases and i2b2 would be an ideal way to connect to healthcare delivery networks with data management strategies around conditions such as coronary artery disease (CAD), hypertension, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
I met some vendors of interest that intersect with the clinical data warehousing world. A company in the Boston area called Diagnosis One has invested in developing a service including thousands of validated clinical decision support rules. We discussed combining their rule sets with the content that gets extracted and loaded into the Recombinant Data Trust. If anyone is interested in combining both a data warehouse and a privately maintained decision support rule library that is curated by physicians, give me a holler and we will pull together a collaboration with the folks at Diagnosis One!
Another vendor, Trizano, developed an open source public health application that could be a powerful tool linked with a data repository to handle the workflows for public health issues. Given that they focus on the beekeeper model like Pentaho, their licensing model should be compatible with research frameworks such as i2b2. Trizano’s tools might be another key application to drive value out of existing data sets.
The drive for meaningful use has also pushed a lot of interest in HIEs, thus these sorts of tools were well-represented at the conference. I was pleased to encounter the booths focused on IHE-HIE systems. The exhibitors clearly conveyed the message that an HIE doesn't ensure the sort of interoperability that is typically suggested. To ensure one will scale to a national level like an NHIN, the HIE must be implemented to satisfy IHE standards. Among the frustrating and somewhat odd outcomes from the rushed drive toward meaningful use by healthcare systems, is that many HIEs may never be interoperable because even the integration systems have put barriers in front of interoperability.
Based on the PHIN tour of HIE technology, it is now my preference to see more IHE-based HIEs. The Europeans and Canadians are rapidly adopting IHE, but in the United States we haven't wholeheartedly engaged in the standards and efforts at the healthcare-network level. Perhaps it isn't too late for national legislation or state initiatives to include requirements that satisfy international standards.
Dan Housman
Managing Director, Analytical Applications
Labels: Data Warehousing, i2b2
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