Consultation, integration keys to InfoMedtrics’ product foundation
By DON LONG
Healthcare InfoTech Managing Editor
GIGO tech talk for "garbage in, garbage out."
But , according to Marv Goldschmitt, vice president of marketing and business development for InfoMedtrics (Needham, MA), even good information put into and pulled out of a healthcare IT system is useless if that information can’t be made understandable and useful for "programmatic change." Healthcare data must be "complete, current and accessible to those who can make that change possible," he says.
Without these characteristics, "great technology and great data are an absolute waste of time." This means that healthcare managers must figure out what they don’t know, find what they need to know and then learn to use the information they do have, says Goldschmitt.
InfoMedtrics’ HealthCare Information Center (HCIC) is a solution for analyzing not just one sector of healthcare information but, rather, examining three important processes: Financial, clinical and administrative. HCIC then integrates these to make the information "reliable, understandable and actionable to the right people," according to Goldschmitt.
Though newly-launched, InfoMedtrics is built on a more than 15-year basis of healthcare consulting under the name Information Architects Inc., then in 1997 renamed to characterize its redirection to product development. Its foundation in consulting has provided a firm launching pad for HCIC; it has already been successfully installed as the Outcomes Data Warehouse for the State of Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation, one of the largest single-line insurance carriers in the world, and as a solution adopted by Procter & Gamble for controlling healthcare premium costs.
Goldschmitt says that the company will soon announce a new installation at a Fortune 500 company, a firm which demanded to see what InfoMedtrics and HCIC could really do before being convinced of its value. "They gave us the project to build a prototype data warehouse from Blue Cross/Blue Shield information covering 200,000 lives, one million claims over a two quarter period," says Goldschmitt. "Then we had to do drill-down studies on rates of readmission and costs for three illnesses diabetes, cardiovascular and asthma providing 30-day figures for a particular region and hospital. And [we had to] do it in eight weeks." InfoMedtrics completed the mission in 5 1/2 weeks, he reports, and the new contract should be announced sometime in February.
In operation, HCIC first avoids GIGO, according to Goldschmitt, by using two major subsystems, the Shipping Loader and the Shipping Dock, both employing statistical language developed by the SAS Institute (Cary, NC). The Shipping Loader is able to integrate a large number of databases using pre-determined rules. This makes it "highly modifiable," according to Gold schmitt, and produces 80% to 90% of what customers will need. They are then able to add the remaining data to match their specific requirements. Shipping Dock is the data extraction tool then used to build summary tables to drill down to the core data creating reports for informed decision-making by key managers.
Integration of information is the heart of this strategy, something not always understood in the healthcare arena, Goldschmitt emphasizes. Chris Pavlic, senior analyst with the Aberdeen Group, shares that view. "[There is] the recognition that the occupational, disability, clinical and financial aspects of healthcare must be brought together in order for true analysis and effective healthcare decisions to be made. InfoMedtrics has effectively positioned itself to address a number of critical market requirements . . ."
Goldschmitt says that over the next five years, the company will increasingly move toward product development, with about 25% of its business remaining in consultation.
Founder and President Bernard Wess says the company’s vision and purpose is "to provide the most comprehensive healthcare information resources available to simultaneously address the quality of care and the management of costs . . . being able to deal with both of these aspects of the healthcare equation is the only way to fundamentally improve the healthcare delivery system for everyone involved."
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