Geisinger Health System, which has long used data to improve clinical care, plans to move beyond one-off projects to using data as part of its everyday business, Nick Marko, M.D., its chief data officer, tells Healthcare Informatics.
"We've taken a step beyond just evidence-based medicine and meta analytics, to taking raw data from patients and looking at the data in real time and on the fly. So it's not just, what one answer can I get to one question based on meta-analysis, but, how can I do this all the time?" he says.
A lot of information is generated during everyday practice, he told the publication, but the organization wants to create tools to use that information more effectively. That involves creating a stable infrastructure backbone to support the scale of its efforts.
The organization is taking its ProvenCare integration of evidence-based medicine and electronic health records to the next level to provide data-driven feedback for care management. It's also using new types of data, such as information captured in unstructured text, that previously has been difficult to harness.
One example, he said, is a proof-of-concept study that used natural language processing to analyze radiology reports for abdominal aortic aneurysms. The system will flag the results when a CAT scan of the abdomen is ordered for a different reason.
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