Healthcare Data Warehouse: Benefits for Medical Organizations

In this day and age, a healthcare organization is brimming with data — data that ends up being stored across disconnected, legacy systems across the facility’s operations. This, unfortunately, leads to not only errors but high rates of inefficiencies as well. However, the ecosystem has found that healthcare data warehouses can successfully and efficiently help deal with the challenges posed by such systems. Before you ask, a healthcare data warehouse (DWH) is a centralized storage system for all healthcare data, including electronic medical records (EMR), enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), electronic health records (EHR), wearables, radiology and lab databases, etc.

Healthcare DWH refers to a digital repository of data gathered from multiple sources and prepared for analysis. It would contain entries from medical records, insurance claims, lab tests, pharmacy prescriptions, or even population-wide research. It is usually an integral part of well-designed healthcare analytics software.

And, if you wish to enhance business intelligence to make the best use of available data, a DWH needs to be a part of your toolkit. A centralized data storage point enables the organization to extract insights, improve decision-making, optimize resources, and provide better patient care.

Let us now quickly look at how medical organizations stand to benefit from a healthcare data warehouse:

1. Automation: One of the most important benefits of a healthcare data warehouse is that it enables quick access to healthcare data, such as patient records, lab test results, insurance data, etc. This, in turn, allows medical organizations to not only optimize patients’ journeys but also automate parts of the journey.
2. Enhanced efficiency: Using a healthcare data warehouse helps medical organizations to speed up operations across the board, make use of analytics-driven insights in newer ways, deliver more efficiency and better quality of healthcare services to patients, empower medical professionals to save precious time, offer a wider variety of healthcare delivery options to patients, and so much more.
3. Boost innovation: Healthcare data warehouses empower medical organizations to leverage the many, many benefits of centrally-stored data. This translates into the ability to integrate innovative use cases for predictive analytics, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), prescriptive analytics, etc.

Finally, some key features of a healthcare data warehouse to help you realize the optimal results:

1. Data security: This one is essentially a no-brainer: healthcare organizations all over the world are governed by myriad regulations, such as HIPAA, to help secure sensitive data. Some key ways to do that include establishing a data management strategy, setting up permissions-based access, establishing permissions even at the business intelligence- and data analytics levels, etc.
2. Data integrity: For data to deliver value, the data in question must be correct, clear, precise, and able to conform to the requirements of a preset data model. To ensure that, you will need either an ETL or an ELT engine. An ETL engine, though time-consuming, is good for modest volumes of data. An ETL engine, on the other hand, will come in handy when you are dealing with extensive volumes of data.
3. Performance: Top-notch, glitch-free performance is a must for tools that deal with sensitive patient and other healthcare-related data. To ensure that, you will need a warehouse with features such as bitmap indexing, automated data backups, etc. In addition to that, make sure that the warehouse enables parallel task execution as well as elastic scaling of cloud resources.

There is no denying that adopting a healthcare data warehouse is a Herculean undertaking. However, as the above discussion demonstrates, with the right features and strategy, medical organizations stand to benefit immensely from this nifty technology-driven tool. So, if you too are looking to take your healthcare organization’s operations to the next level, it is time that you start looking for trusted service providers to help set up a robust healthcare data warehouse for you.

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