Armed to Respond: Leveraging Patient Data To Respond To A Public Health Crisis

By Nina West, Pharm.D.

The movement towards a heightened focus on quality, outcomes and cost requires that healthcare organizations make the best use of data that is available to them. Advancement of health IT in the form EHRs has been an important first step in the health IT movement to accurately capture and house patient data. The next step is to extract important patient information in real-time such that it can be used to impact care delivery in a positive way.

A rich storehouse of data currently exists across the care continuum, but historically, lack of functionality and interconnectivity between disparate systems has made it difficult for this data to be leveraged in a meaningful way for more effective care delivery. For example, while electronic health records (EHRs) facilitate the accurate capture and storage of high volumes of patient data, most hospitals are challenged with how to extract and convert it, in real-time, into actionable information for better decision making.

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