Mention the word “Epidemic”, and images of fear and widespread panic will most likely appear before you.
Mention the phrase “Data Integration”, and thoughts of computers and rows of data servers will probably start floating in your mind.
With one being a medical term and the other a burgeoning IT market, the question would be what is the relation between these two?
So how does data integration play a part in helping the healthcare industry in their fight against pandemics? For example, the deadly SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), ‘bird flu’ or even the recent Chikungunya fever outbreak?
Epidemics – The Threat is Real
Still fresh in the minds of many today, SARS was probably the largest global epidemic of the decade when it took place between November 2002 and July 2003. According to the statistics of the World Health Organization, there were altogether 8,086 known infected cases and 774 deaths, during the near year-long battle against this fatal respiratory disease.
The bird flu, or avian influenza, strain H5N1, was equally destructive when approximately 60 percent of humans known to have been infected with it died. In fact, warnings from the United Nations in 2005 further estimated that a global outbreak of avian influenza can easily claim up to 150 million lives, should it ever take place.
More recently, Singaporeans would be more familiar with outbreaks of mosquito-transmitted diseases like malaria, dengue fever and most recently, the Chikungunya fever. A deadly tropical disease, the Chikungunya fever claimed more than 3,056 lives in Ahmedabad and infected approximately 1.4 million people in India in 2006.
During the Chikungunya outbreak in February, the Singapore government screened 2,626 people for the disease, and conducted more than 4,800 inspections in a bid to contain the spread. To date, there is still no vaccine for the chikungunya fever.
In fact, parts of South-east Asia, East Asia and the Indian sub-continent have furthermore been identified as key “hot spots” for emerging infectious diseases, with all likelihood of being the source of emergence of the next pandemic, according to a Reuters report in February 2008.
Epidemics, with all their devastating effects, are a lurking danger that we simply cannot overlook. The threat is real.
Data Integration for the Medical Space
Few will realize that IT and specifically data integration – the process of combining data residing at different sources and providing the user with a unified view of these data - can play a vital role in helping medical staff combat epidemics.
Through the consolidation of medical reporting, research, auditing and frontline data - including near-real time contact tracing, outbreaks can be contained more swiftly and effectively.
In Asia Pacific, a classic example would be the adoption of data integration solutions by the Hong Kong Hospital Authority in their battle against SARS in 2004. Through their implementation, the Authority was able to enjoy an integrated view across its data warehouse containing historical data on six million patients, or 90 percent of the municipality’s population.
The system allowed the Hong Kong Hospital Authority to instantly retrieve up-to-date patient records across all hospitals and clinics and to create an external reporting system for sharing SARS-related data, which was both critical in supporting contact tracing and quarantine control during this period.
Another demonstration of data integration in the healthcare space would be its use by the Australian Red Cross Blood Service (ARCBS). The move was to help maximize the efficiency of blood-collection efforts by the ARCBS, thereby ensuring the safety and adequacy of the Australian blood supply.
With more than a million blood donations each year, the integration of data from disparate local systems across the continent enables ARCBS to have a consolidated view of its operations nationwide for strategic analysis.
Elsewhere in the world, effective data integration has also helped organizations such as the American Medical Association, British Medical Association, Boston Medical Center, Department of Health of the State of Washington and the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to detect and respond quickly to public health and biological events.
IT Solutions Increasingly Needed for Healthcare Purposes
With healthcare becoming increasingly patient-centric and information-rich, huge volumes of data are being generated by healthcare providers, patients, payers, facilities supplying specialized care on an outsourced basis, and other third-party organizations.
This data is housed in multiple sources across the organization, such as patient records and customer relationship management solutions, staffing and inventory, as well as financials, including claims processing and billing.
As such, it is paramount for healthcare organizations to integrate this data to help improve information management for better decision-making, reduce costs through improved operational efficiency and establish a more robust regulatory compliance framework.
With a proper enterprise data integration platform in place, healthcare organizations will then be able to unlock the value of the information residing in their numerous systems to reduce the complexity of IT environments by bringing together extensive patient information from disparate systems securely and reliably.
Furthermore, they will also be able to increase confidence in the accuracy of patient records and decrease regulatory non-compliance risks by ensuring precise, consistent data delivery with reliable audit trails.
Finally, the implementation of proper data integration can also link clinicians, personalize patient care and enable access to external patient data.
By doing so, medical staff will be able to improve the overall quality of patient healthcare not just during the outbreaks of epidemics, but normal day-to-day operations as well.
The author is Senior Vice President for Informatica SEA Pte Ltd |
