Healthcare Software

The Other Side of Healthcare

The visible side of healthcare is about clinical professionals diagnosing and treating patients. The other side of the coin is not so much about delivering healthcare, but more about pushing the limits of medical science. In other words, this is about the need to collect health data, analyze it and use it to improve medical best practice guidelines.

At every point in receiving healthcare, data is collected about you. Your name, the time of visit, the time the doctor enters the room, the time he leaves the room, medical findings, treatment details—basically anything and everything that can get recorded is recorded. This data goes into databases and can get accessed by hospital administrators, managers, medical researchers, all working to improve the quality of optimize the delivery of healthcare.

Leaving out the analysis done for hospital management and focusing just on the medical side of things, there are essentially two different kinds of data analysis: prospective and retrospective. Prospective deals with the situations where you know what you are looking for and you want to confirm it, as is the case with clinical trials. Retrospective is where you have some idea about what you’re looking for and seek to obtain justification for it by looking at historical data. This can lead to the development of new drugs or procedures for which a clinical trial would be needed. It could also be the basis for medical research such as showing how one procedure is more effective than another.

With this need for data, comes the need for data storage and management. Behind the scenes in hospitals are the databases (or data warehouses for which Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have solutions) that hold the data. Accessing the data is a completely separate process.

A company like Phase Forward, offers products to help deal with the handling of prospective studies and adherence with governmental regulations. Retrospective studies can be supported with by data governance software such as that offered by Informatica.

This aspect of healthcare is huge and translates into an enormous amount of work to get it all working smoothly. Despite being relatively hidden from the principle healthcare customer (the patient), it exists and basically exists to support everything that goes into delivering the healthcare offered.