Part 2: How Particle Ensures Data Quality for HIE Querying

Our previous blog post discussed how our data platform delivers high quality clinical insights, starting with the location and validation of patient medical records. In this article, we'll cover how our data platform standardizes and transforms data in order to enable healthcare organizations to unlock actionable insights across the care continuum.

Standardize

Cut costs and save time with data that's normalized and deduplicated.

• Deduplication: CCDA files are aggregated across multiple sources, meaning there is often a significant amount of repetitive data. This impacts the usability of the data, creating unnecessary noise. To solve for this, we implement deduplication logic after records are aggregated from various sources. For some elements, we saw a reduction by over 90%. Detailed provenance records provide the ability to trace data back to its original files. Development is underway to better capture and organize clinical concepts within our platform. By normalizing data to standard clinical code sets, we enhance the usability of the data for downstream analytics.

Transform

Work with data in the format that best fits your workflow.

• ‍CCDA Conversion: Data from the networks is stored as CCDA documents, an XML format created by HL7 to enable EHR systems to exchange data. The format is complex, but contains a lot of valuable information. Converting CCDA into other formats is a critical step that accelerates our customer's ability to build and iterate. After evaluating multiple open source libraries that convert CCDA to FHIR, some still used by other players in the market, we didn't feel that any of them met our quality standards so we chose a proprietary approach that enables us to ensure we are extracting the most data.‍
• Analytic-Ready Data: FHIR is designed for interoperability and data exchange, not analytics. The deep nested structure makes it difficult for analysts to import it into their data marts which significantly impacts time to value. That's why we developed a simplified flat format built for speed and flexibility by linking clinical concepts across FHIR resources and transforming the data into human-readable tables, which is much more convenient for analysts and data scientists to use.

Unlock

Unlock actionable insights across the care continuum with data built for your use case, accessible via API and UI.

• New Patient Onboarding: Having the complete context of a patient's health from the start means a provider can more confidently deliver care. This means having an accurate understanding of a patient's current and historical medications, completed procedures, gaps in preventative care, allergies, conditions, family history, immunizations, and more. We make this information easily accessible via our single API integration or through our User Interface built for care teams and care coordinators to quickly review the critical pieces of a patient's health history.
• Real-Time Alerts: In order to provide the best care, it's critical to have the most up-to-date and complete picture of your patient's health. Our Monitoring solution automatically detects new care activity and refreshes a patient's record with net new data as soon as it is available. This ensures that providers know what happened and why, while removing the responsibility of knowing when and where to search for new data. This solution was purpose-built to reduce readmissions in high risk patients.‍
• Referral Management: The need for real-time alerts paired with clinical context doesn't stop at readmissions. Ideally, a referral from a primary care physician (PCP) to a specialist results in a completed specialty appointment with results available to the PCP. This is defined as “closing the referral loop”, and is a critical quality measure in value-based care. However, data shows that only 34.8% of referrals resulted in documented complete appointments. The reality is that following up on referrals is timely. Our platform enables provider organizations to pass us a roster of organizations and/or patients to monitor and we handle the rest - alerting the organization when a monitored patient schedules or completes a referral appointment. We also ensure the complete visit results are shared back so providers can stay up to date on new diagnoses, procedures, test results, and more.

Reach out to our team to see how Particle can help your organization unlock value through use-case ready clinical insights.