Electronic Medical Record (EMR) adoption, big data, and other technology trends are generating large volumes and varieties of data for analysis. But data is not the limiting factor in transforming the business and practice of healthcare—managing the data is. If healthcare organizations want to use these technologies to create opportunities to differentiate, they must invest in the data itself.

When this doesn’t happen, data warehouse and analytics project participants typically tackle one use case at a time. If an administrator wants a better understanding of admission trends, for example, they need to know how many patients were admitted the previous week. As a separate use case, this team knows that care coordination teams want to improve care for Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients. They want to incorporate data into the warehouse that allows the care coordination teams to look at CHF patients and learn how many CHF patients were admitted the previous week. As a third use case, the team building a data warehouse has a request for identifying referring providers so they can incorporate a referring provider data field in the data model and data warehouse.

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