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Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) has updated its strategic plan for transforming health care and health research in South Carolina. The plan finetunes HSSC’s vision and goals, while continuing the many activities that HSSC has launched during its eight-year existence to improve patient care and public health. This new strategic plan will help steer the organization over the next five years and beyond.

Since its inception in 2004, HSSC has developed the concepts, infrastructure, and technology that are helping its member organizations raise the level of healthcare research, education and delivery in South Carolina. HSSC also helps its members collaborate more effectively on research projects and health initiatives.

“We want to ensure our priorities are those activities that are most relevant to our members’ current needs as they relate to advancing health research and care delivery,” says HSSC President and CEO Jay Moskowitz. “This strategic plan will help ensure that our efforts have a direct impact on patients in the real world by helping our members move more quickly and more efficiently to improve care.”

With its new strategic plan, HSSC will prioritize several existing efforts that help support its members’ research and clinical activities. Some of these priorities revolve around the use of health information technology (HIT), such as aggregating clinical data and developing information management tools to make research more efficient. These priorities tie into the statewide HIT infrastructure that HSSC has been developing over the last several years to support research and improve patient care.

The centerpiece of this HIT infrastructure is a clinical data warehouse that collects data such as records of patient diagnoses and treatments from member organizations. Through the clinical data warehouse, HSSC can provide rapid access to the aggregated data (with all patient identifiers removed) to health researchers and providers. This data can help researchers make new discoveries and allow providers to make better and faster decisions related to patient care.

Other priorities include connecting multiple institutions for the purpose of collaborative research projects, providing support for members’ grant-seeking activities, and helping members reduce costs so that resources can be used for care improvement. “Developing this strategic plan has really re-energized our organization,” said Moskowitz. “We’re very excited to move forward.”