Healthcare Analytics & Reporting
Case Study
Client
Accumen enables hospitals, health systems, and independent labs to respond to current challenges and even thrive in today’s unpredictable and ever-changing environment. Accumen accelerates results for more than 1,000 US hospitals and health systems by providing expert resources, extensive operational and clinical data, as well as analytic technology.
Business Challenge
In the healthcare industry, data plays a key role in making strategic decisions for hospitals and large healthcare facilities. Accumen was tasked to work with a group of hospitals and healthcare facilities to provide them with data solutions to improve their operational awareness and decision-making abilities. Their goal was to organize their unstructured data and create dashboards that were easy to read and understand. These dashboards would be used by executives at the healthcare facilities to better manage facility operations as well as understand how aspects of their operation compare to others in the medical industry, leading to better patient care and a more efficient system.
Solution
The primary goal for most organizations when handling data is to convert unstructured data from external sources into structured, internal data. This involves extracting large quantities of data from various sources in different formats, loading this data into proprietary data storage systems, and transforming it into a format that data analysts and other professionals can utilize. Specifically, Accumen’s data analysts used the structured data in their warehouse to create Tableau visualizations, providing clients with insights into their operations.
To accomplish this, the team’s first step was to extract data from clients’ electronic health record (EHR) systems, which could be received via TCP/IP, Web Services, File System, or FTP. They then needed to parse the data from various EHR formats, including HL7, delimited files, FHIR, etc. To streamline this process, a third-party integration engine, Rhapsody, was utilized for its standardized solutions to integrate and parse these data sources.
After extraction, a combination of scripts, service buses, message queues, and web APIs was used to ingest the interim data into a structured data warehouse database. The data was then mapped to types that Accumen’s standardized Tableau dashboards could readily use. For the data storage and ingestion pipeline, technologies such as MS SQL, Rabbit MQ, PostGRES, and C# Web APIs were employed. This complete data pipeline operates in batches throughout the day, enabling Accumen to support their clients by visualizing operational data via Tableau analytics and dashboards.
“SOLTECH’s team knows technology quite well and they are adept with the tools and best practices we use. They have quickly become an invaluable member of our team, and I hope that we can continue working together for a long time coming.”
– Andrew Whitworth, VP of Technology at Accumen
Impact
The SOLTECH team effectively processed and converted unstructured raw data into a structured format within a data warehouse. This transformation enabled the creation of insightful Tableau reports for the management team. Employing pivotal technologies such as the Rhapsody integration engine, sophisticated workflow orchestration, and message queuing, the team significantly improved data mapping and warehouse ingestion speeds, leading to quicker report generation.
The newly implemented data dashboards empowered healthcare facilities to enhance their operational workflows, boost overall efficiency, and importantly, save lives. With the data solutions developed by SOLTECH, Accumen has achieved the capability to autonomously generate specialized ongoing reports to meet the unique needs of their hospital and healthcare facility clients.
