University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has embarked on a $100 million healthcare informatics initiative to deliver personalized care through its electronic medical records and big data. Among the goals of the five-year project are to spot potential problems earlier and better utilize data to analyze patient populations, according to a press statement.
The Pittsburgh health system is collaborating with Oracle, IBM, Informatica, and dbMotion to bring together clinical, financial, administrative and genomic data that’s currently tough to integrate and analyze, the statement said. It will essentially create a data warehouse.
Dr. Steven D. Shapiro, the chief medical and scientific officer at UPMC, said the program will help it treat patients on a more individual level for the best results. In a statement from Oracle he said:
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“Today’s healthcare institutions have access to unprecedented types and volumes of data that have the potential to unlock the secrets of human health and disease leading to new and highly personalized care pathways. In this environment, advanced information management and analytics platforms will fuel the next giant leap forward for healthcare, in much the same way that the microscope and antibiotics transformed care in generations past.”
In Healthcare Informatics Shapiro said:
“It’s really about reducing variation and optimizing care models…We also don’t really know how much things cost, so we’re going to be developing information on bundling and other elements. And then there’s the personalized medicine element.”
The initial projects will improve quality reporting and measurement across UPMC hospitals and physician offices, the UPMC statement said. It will provide insight into the effectiveness of treatments and the cost of variations in care and offer predictive alerts that will improve disease prevention.
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UPMC’s initiative sounds like the ideal of what a lot of providers would like to implement but lack the resources to do so. It will be interesting to see how accessible UPMD’s system will be to outside institutions, since the issue of interoperability is a major concern in the healthcare industry as providers work to implement meaningful use requirements for electronic medical records.
A survey of healthcare industry leaders in an ECRI white paper raised that very question. The survey said only about 28 percent of respondents agreed that non-employed providers have remote access to their hospital’s enterprise clinical information systems. And just under one-quarter of respondents’ organization’s EMRs electronically exchange health information with non-employed provider EMRs.
