Health care network starts linking patient data

09.02.2007
Baylor Health Care System has completed the initial phase of an effort to link fragmented data from its disparate systems to establish a 360-degree view of its patients.

The Baylor project, started about a year and a half ago, is aimed at creating an enterprise view of data for patients treated at its 12 hospitals, said Scott Schoenvogel, assistant vice president of the revenue cycle at the Dallas-based health care firm.

Baylor Health expects that the system will eventually be used as the foundation of a patient's comprehensive electronic medical record.

In the first phase of the project, Baylor opted to use the Identity Hub data integration software from Initiate Systems Inc. to link registration data from each of the hospitals in its network, Schoenvogel said. Thus, a patient entering any of the facilities has to go through the lengthy registration process only once, he noted.

"It really lets us carry certain core information about a patient from one place in the health care system to the next," Schoenvogel said. The long-term goal is to link data from multiple source systems - not just the registration system - in the health care network, he added.

With the first phase of the project complete, patient information is funneled through the new software, which scours existing registration data to see if the health system already has a file for that person.