What is data accessibility in healthcare?
Data accessibility plays an important role in delivering high quality patient care as it provides clinicians with immediate access to patient records, including medical history, test results and relevant information provided by other clinicians. Access to the right amount of data at the right time improves clinical workflow by reducing the need to access multiple applications to complete a consultation and provide patients with a diagnostic.
Data accessibility: challenges in healthcare IT
Despite the multitude of benefits, data accessibility remains a significant challenge in healthcare IT as the amount of data increases exponentially each day. Consider that in 2010, it was estimated that medical knowledge was doubling every 3.5 years. In 2020, the amount of time has been reduced to only 73 days1.
The rapid expansion of data underlines the urgent need for improved data accessibility practices and IT infrastructure models to support the delivery of high quality care. Implementing a proven and tested integration engine becomes an immediate way to address this issue for any health ecosystem.
Facilitating data accessibility with Iguana
Connecticut Children’s Hospital, a nationally recognized, not-for-profit children’s hospital, was looking for a solution to easily connect their central EMR with other medical systems such as pharmacy, laboratory and billing systems. Data integration engine Iguana was used to facilitate data exchange between 12 essential hospital systems and the EpicCare™ EMR application.
As a result, clinicians no longer needed to enter data into multiple systems, significantly improving data accessibility and clinical workflow. This reduced data entry errors across systems and allowed the hospital to focus on patient care rather than data entry. To learn more about Connecticut Children’s Hospital, visit our Resource Center.
Data accessibility represents an important pillar in providing high quality healthcare. With access to the right data, clinicians can deliver exceptional healthcare by making informed decisions substantially faster, reducing wait times and contributing to providing better healthcare at a better cost.
1 Source: Densen P. (2011). Challenges and opportunities facing medical education. Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, 122, 48–58.
To see how Iguana can help streamline your health data, let’s have a conversation today.