Health Data Management Benefits, Process, & Challenges in 2023 (1)

Healthcare data is becoming progressively digitized. It is expanding in capacity and worth, just like data in other business domains. Healthcare data management refers to making the maximum use of this data through organization, cleaning, updation, and analysis. 

Data management is a critical activity for medical firms, insurance agencies, hospitals, diagnostic companies, and similar organizations. It can impact operational efficiency and, eventually, the quality of healthcare provided to the patients. Read more about medical data management, its advantages, process, and unique challenges. Additionally, we’ll discuss the viewpoint of healthcare companies that have outsourced data quality management services and understand the benefits of involving a third-party data service provider. 

Healthcare Data Management: The Approach 

The systematized organizing of healthcare data in electronic format is a part of healthcare data management. It could be handwritten prescriptions digitized into medical archives, Electronic Medical Records, or Electronic Health Records.

Health data management involves organizing health data records, integrating them, and facilitating their analysis to ensure effective patient care. Additionally, it entails gaining knowledge that can improve healthcare results while preserving the confidentiality and security of the data.

Healthcare Data Management: Importance 

Healthcare Data Management offers numerous advantages for the medical industry and other associated businesses:

  • Better Quality of Care- monitoring health patterns in certain demographics or geographical areas, identifying emerging practices, recommending preventative steps to address emerging health problems, and determining diagnosis-based care plans.
  • Create Blended Profiles- quick analysis of diagnostic conditions and determination of forecasts for patient groups.
  • Personalized Patient Care- using predictive modeling to target clients with alerts and medication recommendations that may be pertinent.
  • Analyze Practitioner Activities– analyzing the time spent on various treatments and healthcare decisions, success rates, and how well physicians are aligned with the medical company’s objectives.
  • Organization Decision-Making—assists medical practitioners in making good data-directed choices on, for example, the types of practitioners to employ, the equipment to purchase, or the patient demographics to target in marketing campaigns.

Healthcare Data Management: Process 

The complicated process of medical data management includes several essential components, such as:

  • Data Integration
  • Data Enrichment
  • Data Storage
  • Data Governance

#1 Data Integration

Data integration combines information from several sources, such as laboratory management systems, EHRs (EMRs), and many more.

There are numerous steps in the data integration process:

  • Data aggregation and cleaning from several sources to provide high-quality data
  • Data transformation according to specified formats
  • Data transportation from sources to data storehouses and archives.

#2 Data Enrichment

Data enrichment is necessary to prepare data for processing by various healthcare quality monitoring systems. It involves extracting standard and valuable data from many medical IT systems and updating the central database. Enrichment (when performed at regular intervals throughout the right sources) ensures information completeness and relevance. 

#3 Data Storage 

The last phase of healthcare data management is data storage. In this stage, structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data are collated into central storage. Systems are put in place to ensure easy retrieval and facilitate proper data analysis. It guarantees that every authorized personnel across your organization can access the data required for their particular purposes at any time. 

#4 Data Governance

Once you have a system in place to acquire, organize, verify, and store data, it becomes equally important to ensure that the data is accessible, secure, and usable. These responsibilities come under data governance. 

Data governance is crucial as it prevents the misuse of essential data shared throughout an organization. It helps unify master data into a trustworthy source for client safety and healthcare service improvement. Additionally, it helps identify and manage essential organizational data and offers a single point of reference.

Healthcare Data Management: Core Challenges

In recent years, healthcare data tracking moved from entirely print-based to digital. Even now, however, numerous medical data types have not yet been digitalized or included in systems for health data management.

Here are some issues with health data management that professionals currently face:

  1. Fragmented Information: Health data can be recorded in numerous formats, including worksheets, tabulations, repositories, archives, pictures, videotapes, digital records, scanned sheets, and specialized formats. Medical practitioners, healthcare service firms, insurance companies, drugstores, patients, and clients gather, duplicate, and store data in various forms. Consequently, finding a reliable data source on patient well-being is impossible.
  2. Regulations and compliance: Medical information must abide by laws because it is sensitive. Due to problems with data discovery and poor data quality, it is far more challenging to conduct the required audits, adhere to legislative compliance, and limit the types of data that medical practitioners can use to benefit patients.
  3. Data Changes: Healthcare information is continually changing, like patients,’ clients,’ and doctors’ names, vocations, addresses, and health statuses. Over time, patients undergo many tests and therapies, and drugs and treatments evolve, which makes it challenging to keep track.

Healthcare Data Management Tools

As previously indicated, healthcare and medical professionals encounter significant challenges due to unstructured, fragmented, or constantly changing data. Therefore, medical data management remains a concern in the healthcare sector despite the widespread usage of EMR or EHR.

However, data management can be facilitated by IT healthcare systems to ensure more significant and valuable data usage. Medical data management solutions include applications and tools that combine data and files, access medical and procedural data, and leverage and measure substantial data volumes.

Here are a few of the leading tools in the market:

  • Jitterbit
  • Attunity
  • SnapLogic
  • Informatica

Why Should You Outsource Healthcare Data Management Services?

Outsourcing medical data management services to a professional third-party vendor is the most effective method to improve the value of your medical practice and make valuable financial savings. Let’s break it down into five concrete advantages.

#1 Easily Accessible Talent

The management of healthcare data is a complex process with several involved sub-processes. Therefore, all aspects of healthcare data administration,  including data production, data transfer, data quality verification, and analysis of medical documents, require qualified personnel who can handle all of these tasks and produce high-quality outcomes. 

If you hired such resources for an in-house team, you would spend a fortune on consultants, worker compensation and benefits, infrastructure, etc. However, you may quickly access the most appropriate skill sets when outsourcing healthcare data management services to a reputable provider. Additionally, you can easily eliminate administrative costs while still receiving customized services by paying on a project basis.

#2 Best-in-class Infrastructure

Despite having a team of in-house healthcare data experts to manage everyday medical records, you still need to invest a lot of money in the newest tools and technology. In addition, your financial resources suffer due to the cost of getting this cutting-edge office space and technology because healthcare data administration necessitates specialized facilities.

On the other hand, a third-party vendor specializes in offering medical data services and has a ready-made infrastructure to supply these solutions. Outsourcing medical data management services to a professional company gives you immediate access to this top-notch infrastructure, which you can use to improve your primary line of business.

#3 High-quality Services With Complete Security

Medical data management is a highly specialized field that requires the highest level of skill in handling complicated datasets. Only when this condition is met can you anticipate receiving quality services. A healthcare data management vendor not only complies with these criteria but also ensures the confidentiality and safety of your valuable medical data.

Therefore, hiring an ISO-certified services provider is essential to ensure complete data protection.

#4 Customized Healthcare Data Management Solutions

Regardless if you are a giant medical organization or a small health firm, outsourcing healthcare data management services is undeniably advantageous, thanks to the highly developed outsourcing frameworks. The quality service provider can meet your needs by offering flexible and extensible outsourcing deals. The offshore personnel you employ work solely for you as an extension of your internal team. They work together with you to produce customized data management services well before the agreed-upon deadline.

This tailored work arrangement gives you scale economies and produces high-quality, personalized solutions.

#5 An Advantage Over Rival

With access to the best skill sets, top-notch setup, and technology, you can concentrate on your primary duty – practicing medicine. As a result, your overall operational efficiency rises dramatically while your rivals continue to look for fresh approaches to boost the agility of their operations. Ultimately, this circumstance gives you a well-deserved advantage over your competitors.

Concluding Words

The healthcare sector is currently characterized by a vast volume of data, including information about patients, the activity of physicians and clinics, and operational, financial, and other indicators. This data can be used to identify illnesses, enhance the standard of care, do predictive analytics, create novel solutions, and swiftly adapt to the environment in which medical facilities operate.

Effective healthcare data management presents excellent opportunities, and healthcare organizations implementing such solutions can fully benefit from all the advantages these technologies offer.

Author Bio

Gracie Ben is a data analyst currently working at DataEntryIndia.in, a leading company providing data entry & mining services & other data-related solutions. For more than ten years, she has actively contributed to the growth of many enterprises & businesses (startups, SMEs, and big companies) by guiding them to utilize their data assets. Having a keen interest in data science, Gracie keeps herself up-to-date on all the latest data trends and technologies shaping the industry and transforming businesses. She has written over 1600 articles and informative blogs so far covering various topics, including data entry, data management, data mining, web research, and more.