SOURCE: WTN News
As healthcare providers nationwide install and upgrade electronic medical records (EHR) systems in hopes of capturing their share of $27 billion in federal incentive money for “meaningful use” of EHRs, those who manage the underlying IT infrastructure are hard at work trying to manage all the new electronic data being generated. As attendees of WTN Media’s ninth annual Digital Healthcare Conference heard earlier this month, EHRs, data governance and business intelligence are all intertwined.
“BI is strategic in healthcare now,” said Alan Eisman, North American healthcare director for New York-based BI firm Information Builders. EHRs are great at capturing episodic data, Eisman explained, while BI is good at looking across visits, hospitals and systems. But BI technology is useless without the data from EMRs.
