Transforming healthcare with trusted data

Connected identity creates a path to Patient 360

Over 350 access points allow patients to interact with and receive care from THR.

These access points include:

• 27 hospitals
• 80 outpatient facilities, surgery centers, behavioral health facilities, fitness centers, and imaging centers
• 250 community access points, including clinics and medical offices

The variety of patient access points means there are many source systems capable of creating new patient records. Clinicians, physicians, nurses, and staff need access to this data to make decisions and enrich the data based on patient interactions.

Data subject areas include:

• Patient experience (i.e., patient satisfaction)
• Texas Health Physician Group comments (i.e., nurse or doctor notes and billing issues)
• Clinical documentation (i.e., port cleaning and bandage changes)
• Patient behavioral health
• Call center operations
• Digital, web, and mobile
• Patient safety
• Pharmacy data
• Cardiovascular
• COVID-19 cross-functional teams (i.e., supply inventory, patients, staffing, and testing centers)

When data is isolated, it becomes fragmented and siloed, leading to data accessibility challenges and uncertainty. And when teams are left to make decisions on incomplete data, patient experience suffers and negatively impacts overall patient health.

“We wanted to look at it from a ‘connected identity’ perspective to say ‘How often is somebody actually touching us? How are we connecting with that person as a patient and really helping them with their health?’” says Michael Parris, chief data officer and vice president of analytics at THR.

At the start, THR couldn’t bring patient identities together to encourage the desired patient behaviors.

“We couldn't connect a Texas Health Physicians Group visit to one of our joint ventures and back to one of our hospitals,” Parris says. “We couldn't say, ‘Hey, you know what? Everybody is hitting urgent care, then they're going to our emergency department, then they're going to an outpatient service, and then they're coming back to the hospital and staying for three days.’ We could never connect that together as a whole.”

The team sought to identify a single record of truth for patients.

For example, when Carol Smith is the same person as Carol Jane Smith, THR adds additional data to enrich the identity, such as address verification and time stamps.

“We take identities from all the source systems and add all the systems that have additional attributes and information to consolidate identities,” shares Parris. “These are the things we’re building into our Patient 360, which allows downstream systems, from that moment forward, to be fed by a single view of a person.”

An enterprise focus integrates data across the business and multiple source systems, allowing THR to drive deeper insights to improve patient experience and health outcomes.

The Teradata Vantage™ platform has grown from 12 source systems in 2018 to 24 in 2019 and 43 in 2020. THR is now bringing data in from enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance, joint ventures, and human resources. Additional data elements allow the team to have a richer, more connected Patient 360 dataset.

Parris credits Teradata’s ability to utilize interaction data and deploy strength of parallel processing to merge these sources.

With a connected identity and Patient 360 solution in place, the Teradata data warehouse contains master provider data, creating opportunities to better recognize individuals, tailor messages, and improve levels of care. Integrating patient care touchpoints across multiple systems means THR can connect doctor visits, outpatient surgeries, rehabilitation care, pharmacies, and imaging centers. The result is a connected patient care journey that uses data to support patients and improve patient outcomes.

Patient 360 transforms health outcomes

Patient 360 data allows THR to use population data to communicate with, care for, and treat patients. The result is a healthcare system with a care journey tailored to individual patient behaviors and needs while maximizing health across the population. Additionally, this integration and access to data across the enterprise has opened possibilities for teams within the system to improve quality of care.

Parris shares examples in which Patient 360 supports THR's mission of improving community health:

1. Encouraging desired patient behaviors through personalized messages: “When you're looking at a single patient, you can make a decision. With Patient 360, you look at a patient population and make decisions for individual patients ahead of time, before you see them. We can create something specific and tailor that message to that one individual because we understand what the entire population is doing.”
2. Connecting emergency department visits to long-term benefits: “We look at a mobile application to reduce returns to the emergency department, and Patient 360 allows us to quickly see the downstream effect six months after an emergency department visit. Without Patient 360, we would’ve felt like we weren’t reducing emergency visits. Our tactics had long-term benefits of patients being more connected with [THR].”
3. Integrating healthcare interactions for a complete picture of patient journeys: “For people who have a heart procedure, we trace their journey through our system. Where did similar individuals possibly fall out? Where did they stay? On average, how long did it take to go from first visit to heart procedure, and how many steps along the way? These are big visibility improvements because, typically, you can't easily piece together what is happening to somebody—since most of healthcare is treated on the emergency visit or doctor visit. Now we can show that full picture at an individual and group level.”
4. Geocoding patient proximity to access points: “We’ve geocoded addresses to determine the first, second, and third closest clinic—the same for urgent cares, hospitals, and so on. We have all this information prebuilt into our dataset, making our marketing function so much faster and easier.”
5. Balancing hospital preference and proximity based on specialized care: “For obstetrics care, we’ve found you might have a slight preference on a hospital, but how close you are to something makes a lot more difference. We know that if you’re outside of a 20- or 30-minute drive, you're probably not going to go out of your way. This shows how we should customize our interactions with you. You're in a larger segmentation group, but you add factors and get to a very customized message for each person.”

THR is now turning to Teradata’s customer experience solutions and Celebrus to connect the digital patient journey and tailor messages, leading to real-time virtualized care with next best actions. The virtualized care will expand the area THR may cover, improving access and experience of care.

“Depending on whether you come to us from the website, MyChart app, call center, or one of our access points—like the emergency department, hospital, outpatient service, imaging, or urgent care—we know your identity and can figure out the next best action for you,” says Parris. “We can help you have a better patient experience.”

THR has transformed into a data-driven enterprise by demonstrating patient outcomes through data. Moving from targeting large segments of patients to targeting single patients with personalized messages, offers, and actions demands a future-ready data analytics platform that makes these capabilities possible.

Self-service analytics empower the entire organization

Parris credits Teradata’s integrated, managed, secure, and scalable platform as a key enabler of THR’s COVID-19 response. "We were able to put together a dashboard in less than a week and a half,” he says. “It includes clinical activity in our hospitals; testing for asymptomatic patients; supplies, like masks, caps, and gowns; testing strip supplies; ICU capacity; and staff out with quarantine issues.

We’ve connected all that data into one Teradata environment and allow secure, managed access. Now, executives can go to one centralized dashboard to see everything that’s important rather than six or seven different groups. It's accelerated our ability to use analytics across organizations,” Parris continues.

Teradata’s Data Labs allow THR to support self-service analytics, making it easy for users to access production information without moving or replicating data. Teradata’s platform maximizes resources, streamlines processes, and delivers fast and accurate answers.

"We give people access to chunks of our enterprise data warehouse, allowing them to connect to our main data warehouse, build whatever they want for their department in an Alteryx workflow, and publish it to a Tableau dashboard,” Parris says. “My team is orchestrating this through a data governance process. It has helped streamline work important to analytics teams outside my area, leaving my teams time to focus.”