Our next monthly webinar on September 9 will feature Dr. David Fenstermacher, the Chair and Executive Director of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute. The Moffitt Research Institute uses the expressor semantic data integration system to build its newComparative Effectiveness Research (CER) data warehouse.
Dr. Fenstermacher is a researcher and distinguished keynote speaker. He will be presenting on the topic of “Metadata: the cornerstone for tomorrow’s healthcare information management systems” on September 9, 12pm – 1pm EDT. Please register now!
Presentation abstract: Healthcare reform will bring sweeping changes to the current information infrastructure to support new paradigms such as personalized medicine and comparative effectiveness research that will require observational data captured at the point of care be reusable for patients, researchers, clinicians and administrators. The design of new healthcare information management systems must overcome many current challenges including the information gap, the lack of data standards, inadequate information on data quality, and the technical limitations of current data architectures.
As more healthcare providers modernize their electronic data collection capabilities a large focus of the efforts to implement these systems will be the data and not the traditional IT infrastructure. Data interoperability requires the creation of extensive data dictionaries that provide both physical and contextual metadata that allow IT professionals and end-users to effectively manage and use the data. These concepts need to be linked to standards (SNOMED CT, ICD-9-CM, MedDRA, LOINC, and GO) to support the exchange of data beyond an individual healthcare provider. As meaningful use is further refined the standards required might be more clearly defined, but the need for data interoperability will be a key to improving the quality of patient care while maintaining or reducing costs.
In addition, new metadata layers will be required to provide richer knowledge about the nature of the data available in an institutions healthcare information infrastructure that will allow new ways to access and use data. For an organization to create and manage an electronic healthcare data infrastructure that supports interoperability it will be imperative to create comprehensive data governance strategies to adopt data definitions, metadata standards and decided on which national and international data standards will be incorporated into the infrastructure. These efforts will lay the foundation to reveal evidence-based guidelines based on clinical and molecular data to create well-designed clinical trials that will define new treatment interventions towards personalized medicine.
