Healthcare organizations produce and share an unbelievable amount of data every day. From scheduling systems and claims to medical devices and imaging, the data found throughout a healthcare organization can be overwhelming, especially to those tasked with organizing and analyzing it.
In a recent webinar, Mike Christiansen, healthcare data expert formerly with Intermountain Healthcare, described the data challenges the organization was facing and how with the correct technology implementation, they were able to tackle data integration. 
Originally a respiratory therapist, Christiansen decided to make the move to the information services department because of his love for data. Although Intermountain faced multiple roadblocks when it came to data integration and consistency, he tackled the challenge by starting with the most pressing issues. “We had several different data systems that we wanted to combine and that prompted our research into Perspectium.”
Perspectium, a fully integrated end-to-end solution, has the power to bring together siloed data. With incident data that needed reporting, call center data in a separate database, and other data sources that needed to be integrated, a technology solution that could make the data cohesive was a must. “We just wanted to get it together in one place where we can report off of it and have it make sense,” he said.
Although some of their existing technology could run and create reports, it was difficult to do an in-depth analysis of the numbers. “That’s another thing that we wanted to try and resolve,” said Christiansen. “We just wanted to be free to do any analytics we wanted to do.”
“We looked at several different options,” he said. “We ended up using Perspectium because it offered us the most complete solution and reliability.”
Once selected, it was a simple implementation process. “The updates installed really smoothly once we had the server and database in place. Roughly three individuals with 100-man-hours” was all it took to complete the setup.
With this implementation came ease of use, in-depth reporting, and less manual analytics. “We now have the ability for more advanced reporting and yet filter out the easy stuff that end users can do,” he said.
