BUILDING A HEALTHCARE DATA MANAGEMENT PLATFORM

Harnessing the power of enterprise data to support data-driven healthcare performance

Commvault is leveraging its leadership position in data management to help healthcare organizations unlock the power of their business and clinical data to solve key industry challenges.

As the global healthcare industry evolves to meet current regulatory, business, and patient care challenges, one common denominator is the key to realizing success in this space: data. There are three fundamental truths regarding healthcare data today: it is growing, it is siloed, and it is under attack. Meanwhile, forces like the increased consumerization of healthcare and the shift to value-based care have made the importance of leveraging the power of this data as vital as ever.

Commvault is uniquely positioned to help healthcare organizations both manage and leverage the power of their enterprise data. Commvault currently partners with approximately 2,000 healthcare organizations across the globe to help them manage and protect their enterprise data. Commvault’s enterprise data management platform leverages the power recognized by Gartner as an industry leader1 and offers healthcare providers the ideal solution to address their data management challenges and drive organizational performance.

The healthcare industry is complicated; there are a number of issues and dynamics that impact the performance of this space. Here are the forces that play the biggest role in data growth and management.

Force 1 – hospital consolidation (M&A)

The healthcare industry continues to consolidate through mergers, acquisitions and affiliations for various reasons: to increase profitability, in response to changing reimbursement models, etc.

Key data point – 20% of all hospitals will consider a merger by 2020.

Data management challenge:

Rapid consolidation of data between merged entities and associated data sources -particularly medical imaging and EHR data – to support the clinical workflow, standardize data management policies across the enterprise, leverage data for reporting and analytics, and reduce the overall “time to value” from the M&A activity

Implications if left unaddressed:

  • Clinical workflow challenges
  • Erosion of customer (patient) confidence
  • Reporting challenges
  • Inconsistent data management policies, putting sensitive patient data at risk

Force 2 – value-based care transition

The shift toward value-based reimbursement has made it critical for healthcare organizations to deliver positive patient outcomes and focus more on preventive care while keeping costs to a minimum.

Key data point – 45% of providers are participating in some form of alternative payment model, while only 3% believe their organization is highly prepared to make the transition from fee-for-service to a value-based payment system.

Data management challenge:

Clinical data can no longer just sit within the EHR; it must become more active to fully support this transition: it needs to be available for reporting and analytics, available to clinicians to drive low-cost and coordinated care, and made available to patients to support their health ownership.

Implications if left unaddressed:

  • Unnecessary care and redundant tests drive up care costs and reduce profitability
  • Poor coordination of care
  • Erosion of customer (patient) confidence

Force 3 – population health and clinical analytics

Driven by the shift to value-based care, healthcare organizations will increasingly need to harness patient data to stay competitive and deliver quality care. The next generation of this transition is precision medicine, which will harness patient data to drive personalized care.

Key data point – The number of healthcare organizations with population health initiatives has grown year over year from 67 percent in 2015 to 76 percent in 2016.

Data management challenge:

Disparate data sources need to be made “usable” (normalized) to be used across different platforms, with focus on both patient populations and individuals. And effective normalization requires strong data management policies to ensure consistent analytic output. Furthermore, the creation of multiple data copies that are often created to support population health analytics increases storage and infrastructure costs – as well as the scope of data that requires protection.

Implications if left unaddressed:

  • Erosion of profitability as shift to value-based care continues
  • Data not available to support critical clinical and strategic business decisions
  • Unprepared to embrace burgeoning, data-intensive efforts – like merging disparate health determinants (genomic, social) to enable individual care planning
  • Increasing storage and infrastructure costs

Force 4 – consumer-centric healthcare

Consumers are increasingly expecting – and being offered – more control over their healthcare, driven by a rise in HDHP, the increased number of resources available to patients (i.e. portals, provider ratings), mHealth tools, and an increase in retail healthcare. Healthcare organizations will need to harness their data to compete for this more informed and discerning customer.

Key data point – 87 percent of patients want electronic access to their health records.

Data management challenge:

Customers will increasingly have the expectation that any and all health data collected from them – or provided by them – be made available to them through the various platforms they may use to manage their health.

Implications if left unaddressed:

  • Patients may look elsewhere for care if their health information needs are not met
  • In a more price-transparent market, healthcare organizations without a vibrant data analysis function will be at a disadvantage when it comes to pricing care competitively and strategically

Force 5 – data security

As seen by the recent spike in ransomware attacks targeting healthcare organizations, the security of patient information is at constant risk. Apart from the immediate impact of a data breach (downtime, data restoration, potential ransom payment) healthcare organizations are at risk of damaging their operations by losing the confidence of their customers.

Key data point – Healthcare data breaches cost $6 billion per year.

Data management challenge:

Healthcare organizations need a comprehensive data protection strategy across the entire enterprise – including clinics, specialty centers, long-term care facilities, etc.

Implications if left unaddressed:

  • Ongoing exposure to the threat of cyber crime
  • Potential loss of customer confidence and business resulting from a publicly reported incident
  • Inefficient and more costly IT operations resulting from inconsistent data protection policies and enforcement across facilities

Force 6 – regulatory pressures

Regulation is a constant challenge for healthcare organizations and encompasses different aspects of the healthcare business (reimbursement, data exchange, clinical quality, etc.) One constant across these regulations is the need to analyze and report on data your organization is collecting.

KEY DATA POINT – In 2017, approximately 171,000 physicians and clinicians will have a 3 percent pay cut from Medicare for failing to meet meaningful use requirements in 2015.7

Data management challenge:

The reporting requirements associated with the far-ranging regulatory pressures faced by all healthcare organizations requires access to comprehensive, current, quality data.

Implications if left unaddressed:

  • Resource drain on organization to support new and ongoing regulatory requirements without access to normalized data
  • Risk of compliance failure do to inability to access current/complete/correct data

Force 7 – interoperability

The push to create a fully interoperable healthcare IT infrastructure, albeit slow to develop, continues with focus from the vendor community,8 healthcare organizations themselves, and the government.9 Not only will healthcare organizations be required to embrace greater interoperability, it will increasingly be in their best business interest to do so.

Key data point – From 2008 to 2014, the percentage of hospitals electronically exchanging laboratory results, radiology reports, clinical care summaries or medication lists with outside hospitals doubled, from 41 percent to 82 percent.

Data management challenge:

Ensuring that all relevant data is not only available for internal use, but available – and in the right format – to be shared with large and growing number of outside entities and systems (government, patient portals, other providers, information exchanges, etc.) is difficult to address and compounded by the growth in data volume and data streams.

Implications if left unaddressed:

  • Inability to share relevant data to address governmental regulations
  • Inability to keep pace with consumer health information expectations in an increasingly consumer-driven environment, leading to market share impact (fewer patients and less revenue)
  • Critical patient health information unavailable to clinicians, impacting patient outcomes and the overall cost of care

The solution: a holistic enterprise data management platform for healthcare

To most effectively address these data management challenges, healthcare providers need a holistic data management platform that spans their entire enterprise and serves a number of critical functions:

  • Ingest all data streams and sources
  • Normalize this data to make it usable
  • Make this data accessible
  • Protect the data
  • Offer flexibility to accommodate organizational growth
  • Simplicity to ensure operational efficiencies

Data ingestion

The platform must be able to ingest various – and growing – streams of data ranging from sources such as multiple EHRs, payer claims, and patient-generated data

Data normalization

The platform must then be able to normalize and standardize the data so that it is usable and able to serve multiple purposes – shared outside of the organization, support analytics efforts, etc.

Data accessibility

Ultimately, the data must be made accessible to any application or authorized individual or entity looking to connect with it

Data protection

In addition to protecting against growing targeting by cyber criminals, the platform
must be secured according to various legal (i.e. HIPAA) and regulatory (i.e. Meaningful Use) requirements

Flexibility

The platform must be able to support changing technologies, movement of data to different storage platforms, multiple applications, etc. to reflect the dynamics of a growing and evolving industry

Simplicity

The platform must be easy to manage to facilitate operational efficiencies, reduce costs, minimize organizational disruption, and help drive the standardization of data policies across the organization

Commvault: positioned to solve the healthcare data management challenge

Commvault is currently executing on its vision to leverage the leading Commvault data management platform to create a comprehensive healthcare data management platform for enterprise healthcare provider organizations. This platform is being designed to support and enable all of the ways in which data will drive the performance of these organizations in the future.

Current solution portfolio for healthcare

Commvault currently helps approximately 2,000 healthcare organizations throughout the world manage data across their enterprise. Commvault is unique in offering a single solution for keeping all enterprise healthcare data — clinical and business data alike — fully protected and accessible.

Business solutions

Management and protection of core healthcare data assets:

  • Backup, recovery and archive
  • Cloud
  • Application and Data Management
  • Mobile and Endpoint Data Protection
  • Search and eDiscovery

EHR data protection

Management and protection of EHR ( Epic and MEDITECH) system information:

  • Minimize downtime and clinical disruption
  • Minimize time-to-restore
  • Vendor- and platform-independent

Enterprise image management

True vendor neutral archiving for your entire enterprise:

  • Built with the power of the Commvault platform
  • Industry-unique
  • High data migration speeds available
  • Cost-effective
  • Image and document management (XDS)

Approaches to data management platform development

Here is how Commvault plans to solve the specific healthcare data management challenges facing the industry as it continues to build out its enterprise data management platform:

Making data usable: The “best-of-breed” versus “integrated” system paradigm in healthcare IT has swung in favor of the single integrated system, as vendors like Epic and Cerner continue to develop a more mature portfolio and offer more value with their integrated solution portfolio. However, as the industry continues to push for data standardization through initiatives like the ONC’s Interoperability Roadmap12 and organizations like the CommonWell Health Alliance13 and The Sequoia Project,14 Commvault expects to see an increase in development and deployment of technology – like mHealth, predictive analytics, and precision health – that harnesses the wealth of health data created by multiple systems, across multiple enterprises. Commvault intends to position itself as a facilitator of this transformation in healthcare, serving to:

  • Collect data from multiple sources
  • Normalize the data to make it “universally usable”

Making data accessible: Healthcare requires much more than generic reports from monolithic EHR databases to drive operational and clinical improvement. In fact, it is already progressing past the concept of “population health management” to the idea of precision medicine, where the power of data will be captured and applied to very specific care of individual patients. Commvault believes in this transition, and is investing in the platform the industry will require to access, share and turn healthcare data into insight.

Protecting sensitive healthcare data: Healthcare data will continue to be the target of cyber criminals, requiring stronger and more comprehensive security policies and solutions. The Commvault EDMP will play a central role in this effort by offering:

  • A centrally-managed platform to ensure that data protection policies are not only administered uniformly across the enterprise, but cover all data within the enterprise
  • Frequent, unobtrusive data backup processes that minimize disruption of access to clinical data while ensuring very recent copies of data are available should a breach or hardware failure occur
  • Fast time-to-restore with features like bare-metal recovery
  • Vendor-independent archiving support

Offering value beyond existing integration engine solutions: The time has come to not only break down the silos between clinical data sets within the enterprise, but to break down the silos between the fractured approaches to data management within the typical healthcare enterprise.

The Commvault Enterprise Data Management Platform will go far beyond merging clinical and payer data to support data exchange and analytics. It will centralize protection of data across the enterprise, merge the management of business and clinical data within the enterprise, and centralize the exchange of both inbound and outbound data throughout the enterprise – all without the constraints posed by proprietary system requirements. Not only will organizations be able to better transform data into powerful insights, it will be able to reduce costs through smarter IT investment and resource management.

Commvault: a history of performance in the healthcare industry

Today, Commvault partners with approximately 2,000 healthcare organization across the world to help them manage their enterprise data.

Focused on healthcare:

  • Dedicated, healthcare-focused business unit
  • Strategic partnership with Laitek15 to provide enterprise image management solutions
  • Healthcare provider clients include: Denver Health Medical Center, Salem Health, vRad

Strategic partnerships

Technology Alliance Partners. Technology and Alliance partners develop integrated solutions for mutual customers. Commvault creates performance benchmarks and reference architectures with its strategic partners to help streamline identification and implementation of solutions on or off premise.

Global Data Storage Partners. Commvault works closely with the leading storage vendors, investing significant time and resources to deliver unique, joint solutions that incorporate Commvault software. Joint efforts in technical, engineering, marketing and sales help enhance integration, tuning, operational management, implementation and vision for solutions that are designed to meet current and future data management needs.

Healthcare Ecosystem Partners. Commvault works closely with leading clinical application providers.

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