After receiving the honor of Best in Show at the FHIR Connectathon in New Orleans, Healthcare Informatics wrote about our data warehouse in the article, Rethinking the Multi-Institution Clinical Data Repository, featuring interviews with HSSC executives who provide detail on the project at-large, its origination, and its future direction.
“We got interested in the FHIR clinical data repository architecture as a way to convert from having a large centralized data source to a federated model that was closer to our clients. That would meet our needs for a new business model we saw. Previously we had an approach of ‘if you build it, they will come’ with a large central database where people could perform operations. What we thought was that being separated from our customers like that was not a good idea," said Les Lenert, M.D., the SmartState Endowed Chair in Biomedical Informatics at the Medical University of South Carolina.
HSSC President & CEO Kenneth Deans spoke about creating “communities of practice” around types of data.
“We believe the sky might be the limit,” he said. “That is part of the value of moving to the FHIR methodology because we can ingest public as well as institutional data in a much more meaningful way than we have done in the past. The phrase we use is ‘technology-enabled communities of practice.’ If you bring together public health data and institutional medical record data, it allows you to get to very specific communities of practice, and the options of those practices are limitless. They can focus on those that are most meaningful to them — problems such as antibiotic resistance, obesity, or the opioid crisis.”
Read the article in full here.