BI key to e-health, says SWAHS staffer

Using integrated business intelligence software can help harness the benefits of introducing electronic health records, according to a senior IT staffer at Sydney West Area Health Service (SWAHS).

The forklift's running around there in a fairly empty warehouse.

SWAHS staffer Trevor McKinnon

"The biggest issue you have with the electronic health records is that nursing staff are providing the bulk of the entry," SWAHS business intelligence and web development director Trevor McKinnon said in a recent interview with ZDNet.com.au. The nurses felt that they were not getting any of the benefit and doing all the work, he said.

Indeed, most of the advantages of having electronic health records were seen downstream, he said, when, for example, doctors were able to see the information nurses had entered.

He hoped that in years to come, business intelligence could alter this perception by running text analytics on the data from the electronic records to make nurses' workload less and not more. Business intelligence would use text analytics to "get into what's written" and pre-write a report which the nurse simply had to review, instead of creating.

"Business Objects certainly has the potential to do that," he said, although he didn't believe it would happen until 2011. NSW Health has a whole-of-state contract with Business Objects and uses the company's Xcelsius platform. McKinnon is one of the leading drivers of its use, taking on not just business intelligence for SWAHS, but for other area health services within the state as well.

Just as business intelligence would help electronic health record acceptance, the progression of electronic health records would help business intelligence. Although the groundwork for electronic records in NSW had been done, McKinnon said, only the emergency departments and intensive care were recording patient information electronically. In other departments nurses were still writing reports by hand.

This limited the breadth of data which McKinnon had at his disposal to run statistics using the business intelligence, with only information such as admissions and outpatient services available for use. "The forklift's running around there in a fairly empty warehouse," McKinnon said, although he admitted that the information being gathered already was prolific enough to keep him very occupied.

This data is currently used to measure performance for the hospitals, and Sydney West Area Health Service uses dashboards built on the information to benchmark how staff are performing. It also is used on the patient side. If a "frequent flyer" patient comes into the emergency department, the business intelligence application can inform the employees which professional the patient saw previously — this often allows cases which don't need hospitalisation to be given other treatment and sent home, freeing up beds.

McKinnon looked forward to when most patient records were being entered electronically so that business intelligence could carry out functions such as finding keywords in records which could alert a doctor to the fact that a patient may need attention, increasing the level of care. "We can't wait," he said.