Fighting the First Pandemic in the Age of Data: How COVID-19 Is Reshaping Healthcare

More than 150 years ago the groundwork for our current battle against COVID was laid in the streets of Victorian-era London. Using geospatial mapping, Dr. John Snow showed cases of cholera were clustered around public drinking sources in London’s West End, revealing not only the true source of disease spread but also establishing a new era in public health. Dr. Snow would no doubt be amazed at how far we’ve come to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in the “age of data” – an era where advances in analytics visualization as well as cloud and interoperability capabilities profoundly impact both our epidemiological understanding and ability to make informed health care actions. Lessons that we are learning now will extend into the future for many other purposes in healthcare as we’ve seen how sharing of data across the wider ecosystem is essential to understanding a complex situation with exogenous factors.

The COVID-19 outbreak has shown data’s promise, but it has also highlighted critical building blocks that organizations must align to enable fast, more effective use of data. As such, the ability for a wide spectrum of organizations to share data in near real-time from hospitals, labs, HIEs, and nursing homes to public health entities has reinforced the need for interoperability standards and a platform to organize data. 

Interoperability: Even More Critical in the COVID-19 Pandemic 

As global health experts frantically study COVID-19, they’ve recognized that rapid data sharing makes it easier to identify trends in critical inputs such as symptoms, recovery times, mortality rates, and treatment efficacy, across care settings and geographic locations. Unfortunately, public health agencies and healthcare providers have not used the same information systems, data formats, or even data standards, slowing the ability to share data in a timely, efficient manner. 

Information Builders is involved with an HL-7 FHIR taskforce working to create new Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards so critical information can be shared and collected on data points including hospital bed and ventilator availability. With this capability, first responders and public health officials will be able to quickly make decisions on where to direct patients for care and where to deploy needed resources. By standardizing the data through FHIR, we can greatly reduce the time and resources required to analyze that data and ultimately standardize our understanding of this emerging virus and the most effective interventions.  While this data sharing infrastructure will support COVID-19 efforts, the benefits of this work will help with future events that stress our healthcare systems capacity. We’re really energized by this important initiative and are helping our healthcare partners leverage data on the front lines like the Health Collaborative as they take on vital work related to COVID-19 response

 Leveraging Patient Population Data to Identify At-Risk Patients

 Researchers have been able to quickly identify how both clinical factors such as comorbidities and also socioeconomic determinants of health (SDoH) contribute to coronavirus spread and impact patient outcomes. For healthcare organizations ranging from hospitals, HIEs, and public health agencies that need to plan and deploy resources efficiently for maximum impact insight into their patient populations is key. To quickly get this information to care teams, they need the ability to bring together clinical and claims data quickly as well as outside sources like SDoH factors for a complete view of their patient populations. This allows for optimized allocation of resources for the sickest patients. As researchers uncover more factors these data points can quickly be leveraged if your data house is in order.  

 Omni-HealthData the Data and Analytics Platform for a View Across the Patient Journey

At Information Builder’s our clients are able to leverage Omni-HealthData the most complete healthcare data and analytics platform available today. Omni-HealthData brings together disparate data including clinical, operational, and financial systems, claims, SDoH factors, and more to provide a complete view of the patient journey and organizational view. This allows Omni-HealthData users to pivot to data needs more completely with the confidence that they have an accurate single version of the truth to leverage across management and care teams to nimbly respond to the pressures of COVID-19 on the healthcare infrastructure.  We would be happy to discuss how we can help your organization on their journey to leverage data to create healthier communities.