Data standardization is a vital component of today’s healthcare computing environment, allowing clinical information to be effectively and consistently collected, compared, and analyzed. Standardization also enables this data to be efficiently exchanged with healthcare partners such as insurers, pharmacies, affiliated providers, and public health departments. Very simply, without standardization, patient data such as diagnoses, procedures, therapies, and medications cannot be effectively captured and understood by different healthcare computer applications. This “interoperability gap” severely limits any organization’s ability to truly understand its clinical operations and effect improvements through cost analysis, decision support, quality measures, and utilization studies.
Comparable and interoperable data are absolute requirements for Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) and related Health Information Exchange (HIE) projects. At regional and national levels, non-standard data simply cannot contribute to an improvement in our overall health care system. The benefits of greater data accessibility afforded by standardized data are myriad. Healthcare enterprises are better able to deliver innovative, high-impact products and services and to identify best practices using fact-based outcomes analysis, which in turn leads to better care at lower cost. Healthcare information technology vendors also benefit from the use of standardized data, which enables the delivery of more effective, complete, and integrated products across a diversity of individual product lines.
Apelon has worked with a number of leading of healthcare organizations, including those in the ONCHIT National Health Information Network (NHIN) project, to help create, build and maintain data interoperability solutions. One common theme in these projects is the necessity of “mapping” local and proprietary lists, dictionaries and code sets to national standards. Mapping creates correspondences between these local data sets and standards, enabling improved data interoperability.
Apelon offers a number of data interoperability products and services to assist organizations in achieving comparable information. In addition to the NHIN project, Apelon clinicians and informaticists have assisted agencies such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Defense, the National Cancer Institute, and the Veterans Adminstration, as well as numerous provider and commercial companies, on major interoperability projects.
Many of these projects take advantage of Apelon’s TermWorks data mapping solution. TermWorks is an innovative technology for integrating standard healthcare terminologies such as SNOMED CT®, CPT®, and ICD-9-CM, into web based applications. TermWorks can give any organization powerful terminology mapping functions -- including search, concept navigation, and code mapping -- without the high cost of hardware and software acquisition, installation, integration, maintenance and support. For the TermWorks Data Sheet, click here.
For a copy of our Data Interoperability White Paper, receive more information about TermWorks, or learn more about Apelon’s other data interoperability solutions please complete the information request form.
