| | November 20178CIOReviewIMPROVING VISIBILITY THROUGH INTEGRATED INFORMATIONBy Wes Williams, VP & CIO, Mental Health Center of DenverHealth care has made huge changes in how content is managed in the 12 years since I left clinical practice to focus on health IT. As a clinical psychologist, all my intake assessments, progress notes, and treatment plans were hand-written. I moved into health IT to help digitize behavioral health care and have seen a sea change in enterprise content management that spans electronic health records, data warehousing and business intelligence, corporate intranets, cloud computing, and now interoperability and health information exchange.Building an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) was our first step towards modernizing enterprise content management. Using reporting tools built into an electronic health record (EHR) restricts the queries to a single source system. In contrast, with a EDW queries can span multiple systems. We started building our EDW four years ago when we decided it was time to replace our legacy EHR. Looking forward, we knew we wanted to ask questions looking at metrics collected in both the legacy and the new EHR. In addition to EHR data, our EDW includes information from other key systems such as accounting, general ledger, HRIS, and identity management systems. We wrote our business rules into the extract-transform-load (ETL) processing for our EDW so that analysts wouldn't have to know how source data had been coded in each system when authoring reports.Before we had an EDW, analysts built reports using reporting copies of the transactional tables from the source system; each report used complicated tangles of CASE statements to account for programming changes in the EHR. This limited the number of people that could function as an analyst. Out of a staff of 30 people, only three had the depth of understanding to be able to author more complex reports. Now our ETL transforms the source data into clearly labeled and documented information easily translatable to business operations. Now I have over 10 employees authoring reports, and those aren't limited to Data Sciences staff. Not only are other teams within Information Systems, such as Application Development and Applied Research and Process Analysis, able to retrieve information from the EDW, but clinical informatics and finance staff have self-serve access to business intelligence and the underlying EDW tables. This has driven adoption of data-driven decision-making in our organization.Implementation of SharePointA second step in enterprise content management has been our implementation Wes WilliamsIN MY OPINION
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