Data as a Driver forHealth Transformation
The Challenge | Improving Outcomes with Community Health Data
The Health Collaborative partners with area hospitals and the community to lead health transformation, including advancing community health, workforce innovation, and emergency preparedness. Currently, the Collaborative is focused on using data to transform the top priorities of the Community Needs Assessment: mental health, heart disease, and housing.
As part of a new direction for the organization, The Health Collaborative was looking for a partner with strong capabilities in advanced data and AI services to complement its own abilities in the creation of new health transformation products, services, and initiatives.
“Data exchange and analysis is the core to improving community health outcomes,” according to Deirdre Beluan, CEO. “Data is the center of our business, and that’s why we turned to a data partner we could trust.”
This grocery chain approached CoStrategix with five distinct data challenges across several stages in the information lifecycle. CoStrategix thrives on tackling challenges like these, where there isn’t a clear path to the solution and the expectation is to deliver on an ambitious set of features.
Results
CoStrategix has helped the Collaborative leverage data from community healthcare organizations to support services that benefit the community. They established a secure, modern, and cost-effective Health Collaborative Data Cloud and associated reports to support multiple data sets from its local member hospitals:
- TraumaBase – Aggregated trauma data to improve trauma care and inform public health policy
- Workforce – Hospital Compensation Survey data used to identify trends in wage and staffing levels
- Mama-Certified – Pre- and post-natal care data aimed to improve maternal and infant health outcomes for minorities, part of the Mama-Certified equity-centered maternal care initiative
- Syndromic Surveillance – Aggregated reporting of infectious disease trends
The modern data ecosystem ensures security compliance, regulatory compliance, and better cost management. It also paves the way for more datasets to be ingested seamlessly.
In addition, CoStrategix serves as an extension of the Collaborative’s small but mighty analytics team. While their analysts focus on evaluating clinical strategies for health transformation initiatives, CoStrategix provides critical data expertise as needed. CoStrategix helps with tasks both large and small – from assessing what’s required to deliver on new grant opportunities, to coding, to exploring new ways to leverage data and AI to improve productivity.
The Process
CoStrategix began the engagement with a comprehensive Data Strategy Workshop, which laid the groundwork for designing and implementing a modern Health Collaborative Data Cloud infrastructure to facilitate health transformation. This process enabled all stakeholders to align on strategic priorities, gain a clear understanding of the available data assets, and map out the upstream and downstream flow of data throughout the organization.
CoStrategix also assisted in transferring the Collaborative’s robust data model for its datasets. This effort standardized data from various hospital sources. The standardized approach established a scalable framework, making it easier for the Collaborative to incorporate new data sources in the future.
One of the biggest technical challenges was ensuring a highly secure environment for the Collaborative’s Private Health Information (PHI). CoStrategix used Microsoft Azure data services to build the Health Data Cloud, with special precautions for HIPAA compliance – including creating firewall rules and VPNs for the Azure tenant so that data cannot egress the system except when reported to stakeholders.
“CoStrategix has become our true strategic data analytics partner. They are with us every step of the way in leveraging data to drive improvements in health outcomes,” Beluan said.
“CoStrategix has enhanced our ability to collect and curate strategic data assets, drive services revenues, and enable innovation in health transformation.”
Deirdre Beluan
CEO
