The Role of HIE in Clinical Analytics
Rodney Hamilton, MD, CMIO, ICA
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In his rumination about HIMSS12, John Moore also likened the current buzz in clinical analytics to a similar buzz a few years earlier about HIE, when that market was first emerging and bursting at the seams with excitement and promise. Turns out the two may go hand-in-hand and in fact both bolster the effects of the other.
As stated, the problem now isn’t a dearth of clinical data. The problem is rapidly becoming too much data housed in various and “disparate” storage systems in different formats that are difficult to access and often impossible to align in a usable way for physicians treating patients. Hence the phrase: “messy data.” Many of the elements of HIE have been built to address this quandary. It’s one thing to pull and aggregate usable structured data from rational systems. It’s another to access combinations of non-structured and discrete data from non-friendly systems with conflicting information and be able to interpret that data in real-time while treating a patient individually, or at a population level, to make broader management decisions.