With the pandemic bringing about necessary change at a tremendously fast pace, healthcare organizations have had to react, improve, and enhance their overall offering.
While we have seen significant developments in technological innovation, there has also been a global shift in consumer behavior. Patients now have higher expectations, wanting an easy, personalized service rather than to be treated like a number.
The key to delivering this service to your customers lies in big data. Collecting data on patient illness, treatments, and current bill of health, as well as essential data like address, phone and emails, can help the healthcare industry to understand and cater to their patients’ needs.
But, to do this, you need to extract maximum value from the big data - and that’s where your data fabric comes in.
Where does healthcare data come from?
To understand the scenario, let’s first take a look at where the healthcare industry collects its data from:
- Health records
- Medical devices
- Wearables
- Pharmaceutical research
- Medical imaging
- Smartphones
While the quantity of data is far from scarce, collecting records from these varying and disparate data sources comes with the risk of incomplete, inaccurate, mismatched, or duplicate records entering your patient databases. This collection of unstandardized data can cloud your analysis, leading to downstream issues that affect patient engagement and wellbeing, as well as current and future business decisions.
The impact of unstandardized data in the healthcare industry
When Amorphic published their findings on the challenges of data in healthcare in 2020, they found that electronic health record (EHR) data matched patient-reported data in just 23.5% of records. This disparity led to 80% of serious medical errors being caused in medical settings as a result of miscommunication.
This highlights several concerns, but most notably, that data is not being captured correctly, nor is it being verified or checked against existing records, resulting in fragmented care delivery for patients. Thankfully, the task of creating unified records can be made easier by replacing old data architectures with newer models, where cross-referencing and matching comes as standard.
To do this, a shift needs to be made to move away from data silos so that a holistic overview of patients can be securely viewed in real-time.
The benefits a data fabric can offer healthcare organizations
A unified approach to data sets is essential to success in the healthcare industry, something which data fabrics can enable. By removing data silos and providing a single point of access to all your data from an extensive pool of distributed data sources, data fabrics can bring much-needed harmony to disparate data sets.
The data fabric also ensures effective data governance, which is key when scaling the use of data for analytics and AI. The main four advantages of data fabrics are:
- An agile and flexible structure
- Enhanced data visibility and visualization
- Improved access to data
- Better data governance
Having one clear base makes analysis and insights within that data far easier to read and extract, gaining not only a 360-degree customer view but also helping to inform strategic decisions and crucially create a single source of truth for healthcare patients.
Yet, a data fabric alone does not have the power to eclipse the healthcare industry’s data collection challenges. In fact, the data recorded loses value if it is not verified or validated upon entry to, or as legacy data within existing databases.
Data verification is an essential add-on to any data fabric
With so much data accessible, it is critical to ensure it is clean, validated, and a sole source of truth to obtain the most significant benefit for healthcare organizations and their patients. We believe that coordinated, accountable, patient-centered care depends on whole-picture patient data, which is where our unique data solutions come in to provide a reliable, trusted service.
Across global territories, there are approximately 6,500 spoken languages, 139 character scripts, and more than 130 different address formats continuously changing. We know by now that the extent of usefulness of address data is critically dependent on the quality of the data. This implies the requirement for all data to be verified, enhanced, and formatted to one single standard. Still, variations in the methods used to collect patient data in EHR systems make it challenging.
To combat this overwhelming fact, we provide a global portfolio of high-quality data to enable effective communication between patients and healthcare organizations. We offer type-ahead predictive, address, phone and email verification and enrichment technologies that capture and return validated data in real-time for all countries and territories. For example, if one administrative worker enters an address as ‘Ave’ and another as ‘Avenue,’ the software will automatically correct that to the standardized version to ensure a comprehensive record is collected.
This technology will help healthcare professionals:
- Improve data analytics and visualizations to quickly and effectively spot patterns in patient care or treatment plans to better serve the needs of the patient
- Reduce costs of unverified data correction, as well as mitigating critical issues such as sending medical records to incorrect addresses or patient mismatching
- Mitigate compliance risks when building and utilizing data fabrics with AL/ML-driven data validation and data enhancement capabilities
Integrating Loqate’s solutions into an existing infrastructure is seamless. Learn more about how integrating Loqate’s verification services into your data architecture can help deliver high-quality data to your data fabric ecosystem in our white paper, “Data Verification Solutions: A must-have component of your Enterprise Data Fabric.”
