Getting more value from EMR and EHR healthcare data

This blog post is an overview of a webinar, Unlock the value of your health data with solutions through AWS Marketplace. The session featured guest speakers Dr. Tim Pletcher, executive director at Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN), and Emily Sokol, director of research at Xtelligent Healthcare Media. In this webinar, we went into more detail about the state of healthcare analytics, shared a success story from MiHIN, and introduced specific healthcare data solutions available in AWS Marketplace that offer support for accelerating your value-based care initiatives.

The challenge of healthcare data

Healthcare data can be unstructured, incomplete, and difficult to access. These issues are becoming a hindrance to organizations’ vision of value-based care. When the quality of clinical data is limited, it hinders your ability to use that multisource, multiformat data for downstream use cases. To address data quality, you must understand what technologies healthcare organizations use and how these metrics are communicated with providers to inform their value-based care efforts.

A recent Optimizing Analytic Solutions for Value-Based Care survey of healthcare providers and payors conducted by Xtelligent Healthcare Media is helpful in understanding the most significant challenges to improving value-based care. For example, 65 percent of respondents cited provider uptake or behavior change as the biggest challenge, followed by population health data insights at 53 percent. These attitudes are leading healthcare organizations to identify the best analytic tools and most important features when selecting new technologies.

How MiHIN and Diameter Health uncovered the value of healthcare data from disparate EMRs

MiHIN was seeking a technology partner to help optimize its disparate electronic healthcare data. MiHIN wanted its continuity of care documents consolidated into a clean and consistent record. These large XML files were collected from various electronic medical records (EMR) systems and oftentimes came in different formats and contained duplicate information. MiHIN needed a solution to help deduplicate, reorganize, and consolidate these records to improve the quality of their clinical data.

A second requirement was to take the newly consolidated record and quickly map it to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). MiHIN wanted the ability to organize the clinical, claims, provider, and other data in a way that would be ready to serve up to consumers. The goal was for individuals to use a mobile app to easily connect to the service and access that highly portable data.

By partnering with Diameter Health and AWS, MiHIN was able to use the strengths of both parties to create a pipeline of data from different sources and move it to a single platform. The automated solution would then normalize, enrich, reorganize, deduplicate, and summarize the data, then publish FHIR bundles to a HealthLake repository for a variety of innovative downstream use cases.

Finding and deploying EHR and other data and analytics solutions for healthcare

With a vast network of technology partners, AWS can help with the outside thinking and technology advances to take healthcare interoperability to the next level. AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for healthcare organizations to find, buy, consume, and manage third-party software, services, and data that customers need to build solutions and run their businesses.

AWS Marketplace offers quick, easy, and secure deployment, flexible consumption, contract models, and streamlined procurement and operations. Research shows it takes around half the time to find, buy, and deploy a solution through AWS Marketplace compared to other sources. The third-party solutions available in AWS Marketplace Healthcare and Life Sciences are purpose-built to help enhance value-based care initiatives. You can explore the healthcare catalog here, electronic health records (EHR) solutions here, and healthcare analytics solutions here.

Conclusion and next steps

Many healthcare organizations are looking for support in finding value-based care solutions that work for them. They are dependent on the advancement of technology to help enhance patient care, lower costs, and improve outcomes throughout the continuum of care.

With technology and talent top of mind, healthcare organizations are learning how to implement business-critical solutions to enable value-based care with applications available in AWS Marketplace. To learn more about real-life use cases and customer stories, watch the on-demand webinar Unlock the value of your health data with solutions through AWS Marketplace.

About the author

Michael Leonard is responsible for growing the AWS Marketplace healthcare vertical business. His previous role was as a Principal Product Manager on the AWS Storage Gateway team. Over the past 20 years, Michael has progressed through a variety of roles in business development, product management, and engineering at AWS, Commvault, Iron Mountain, Merge Healthcare, and GE Healthcare. He built and managed teams to develop Healthcare IT solutions focused on medical imaging, EHR systems, hybrid cloud storage services, and data protection solutions.​