Long before Baptist and Epic partnered to build Baptist’s electronic medical record (EMR) system, a question circulated that continues to exist today in our industry. When health care organizations create a record for every patient encounter, how do companies effectively manage a growing amount of information?
In December 2015, senior leaders here at Baptist approved a pilot project utilizing the SAP® Business Intelligence Suite of products. SAP® is a German software corporation that makes enterprise software to help businesses manage operations and potentially integrate data from a variety of sources. SAP is the most widely used application around the globe to promote the presentation of actionable results with using integrated data elements.
This pilot project is supported with Fusion Consulting, Inc., a SAP_® Gold Partner. As a result of this partnership Baptist stepped into a new chapter of learning how to manage data to create technical intelligence aimed at generating meaningful data for all users.
“We’re creating a roadmap to building a full-scale data model. We’re essentially building a foundation for the future of Enterprise Analytics and Business Intelligence,” said Jamie McGlothlin, Ph.D., chief data architect with Fusion.
Data for any company are just data unless they’re accessible and reportable. And while the Baptist teams are more than capable of building reports and extracting data, at some point, the data overwhelm the efficiency of custom-report designs. Each month, the team processes on average 200 report requests of varied complexity. Baptist isn’t alone in this phenomenon. When companies convert to an EMR, it’s common for report requests to increase, but the high volume isn’t sustainable or a best use of resources.
For the reporting, application and technical teams involved in this pilot, work began at a granular level. “We had to acquire servers and look at the power and infrastructure first before we could write the first metric using these advanced tools,” said Vernita Thornton, director of data and reporting for the Baptist OneCare team.
Once the hardware was in place, the teams then worked with many subject matter experts (SMEs) to define reporting criteria to produce the pilot metrics. “Many of the reporting metrics for this initial pilot came directly from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) or the providers who wanted us to track certain data,” said Patti Hollifield, senior business analyst with Corporate Quality.
Pilot metrics included length of stay and various outpatient quality metrics.
As a result of this pilot Baptist is also growing in the area of data governance. This project resulted in one of the first full-scale scoping documents. “We’re working on a scoping document defining what our data governance looks like. This is the first time in Baptist history we’ve discussed developing a more defined data governance platform that will further aid in data acceptance and validity,” said Vernita.
SAP® makes defining metrics and translating data into usable information much easier. Looking far ahead, Baptist wants users, who would not generally consider themselves to be report designers, to be able to push a button on ready-made definitions and report templates. In fact, engagement now from users is a large part of the learning process. “Many clinicians aren’t accustomed to compartmentalizing information, as many have been trained to take notes and combine all their information. Not only is there a learning curve for clinicians and others who document within the system to understand technology, but it is also important how to structure information so it can be captured later in reports,” said Patti.
In just shy of a year, the SAP® pilot is already helping users identify areas that could benefit from increased data mining and reporting with the help of SAP.