Reaching for Help
Plenty of vendors stand ready to help health-care providers mine their data. Here are some pros and cons of relying on outside assistance.
CIO — Companies balking at the money and skills needed to develop advanced data mining tools have the option of paying someone else to build the tools—or even to mine the data—for them. Outsourcing all or part of the data mining process can be less expensive and time-consuming than handling it in-house. Such vendors as Mitchell Field, N.Y.-based CrossZ Software, HealthShare Technology Inc. in Acton, Mass., Philadelphia-based Care Management Science Corp. (CMS) and The Medstat Group in Ann Arbor, Mich., offer ready-made databases of publicly available medical information that hospitals can mine at will. Often, those outsourcers also will integrate a provider's internal data with their own databases. And the fact that outsourcing vendors have other customers can be an added benefit: Organizations that farm out their data mining can foster working relationships with other customers and compare their data.
One hospital that went the outsourcing route is Birmingham, Ala.-based Brookwood Medical Center. Brookwood built its own data warehouse from a variety of different internal sources in 1992, but decided to outsource the data mining component to CMS and other vendors rather than develop it internally, says Sue Esleck, administrative leader for care continuum. "I didn't feel like we could satisfy our physicians by trying to grow that in-house," says Esleck. "They were far too sophisticated and required real, proven data." Brookwood sends semiannual data feeds to CMS and receives a summary report of the data mining results. Esleck also has developed a phone relationship with a fellow CMS customer in Pittsburgh. When questions arise about outcomes measurement, Esleck simply gets on the phone for a collaborative tete-Ë -tete.
But there are dangers inherent in settling for a quick data mining fix. The perceived cost savings may be misleading; companies can end up spending as much as $1 million a month, says Mark Brown, program manager for data mining and applied analysis at the Cary, N.C.-based decision-support software vendor SAS Institute Inc. And companies that outsource everything lose control of the process. They often miss the real story behind the data upon which they base their big business decisions. "If you don't understand how it all takes place, you're making a mistake because you might need to explain it to the CEO some day," says Robert S. Brown Jr., a doctor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
"You can't outsource outcomes measurement totally because you've got to understand what you see," adds Esleck. "Somebody in-house has to be able to take the reported information and apply it to determine what needs to be changed. Otherwise it's just data."
- J. Bresnahan
