NEW MILFORD, Conn., Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- With the recent purchases of its SmartCare(R) healthcare data warehouse/mining software by a major regional insurer and by a state government, Connecticut-based Vantage Point Healthcare Information Systems (http://www.vantagepointinc.com/) has now sold the system into all of the major sectors of the American healthcare delivery system. This is a breakthrough in the effort to establish a common data repository that can be shared by all healthcare organizations.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20041110/NEW008 )
The delivery of healthcare in America is commonly divided into 4 primary sectors, payers (insurance companies and HMOs), hospitals, physicians, and government. The two new Vantage Point clients are the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of New York, and the State of Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH). HIP, with over one million members, will be using SmartCare to monitor contracts with over 800 provider organizations and employers. IDPH will start by loading 25 million claims from hospitals across the state. Two very different organizations with very different missions, using the same system, right out of the box, no customization required.
What is even more exceptional is that the identical system is also being used by one of the nation’s largest regional hospital/physician networks, Sharp Healthcare of San Diego, California, and one of the nation’s largest physician associations, the 2,300-member Hudson IPA of Tarrytown, New York. The simple fact that four such different organizations solved their data warehousing, mining and reporting needs with the same system shows that having a common platform for storing and analyzing healthcare data is not only possible, but a reality. With SmartCare, Vantage Point has achieved the breakthrough that many thought would never come.
The problem has been that while everyone in healthcare agrees on the need to share data, there are many incompatibilities among the many different computer systems used in each sector. These technical problems are compounded by the fact that each sector has its own set of issues it wants to analyze, thus creating a situation in which most analytical healthcare software is not enterprise-wide in scope.
For some time now, the only solution has been for healthcare organizations to build proprietary data warehouses, data mining, analysis and reporting systems that cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and not even attempt to tackle the data sharing and scope issues. With SmartCare, Vantage Point solved both the data sharing and analytical scope problems. It created a system that combines the data warehouse with data mining, interactive analytics, and reporting software into a single, completely integrated package. It solved the problem of merging data from different sources, even merging clinical and financial data. Its analysis workbench lets users create thousands of reports instantly and see the results in vivid 3-dimensional color graphs and charts (see photo). The whole package costs hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the proprietary systems.
So for HIP and the IDPH, as it was with Sharp and the Hudson IPA, it’ll take less than a week to merge the data sources and load them into the warehouse, a task which typically takes months for proprietary healthcare data warehouse installations. Then analysts will be able to generate reports immediately, instead of waiting up to a year for custom reports to be designed and tested. They’ll be able to perform serious data mining, drilling down into the warehouse to discover such things as which doctors are sending patients to the ER and why, or how the cost of care for patients high blood pressure change from one year to the next.
Vantage Point’s CEO Lawrence Borok sees that now one of healthcare’s hopes may be fulfilled: “With the low cost and high performance of SmartCare, every healthcare organization can fill a big gap in their IT superstructure. Organizations can have a fast, inexpensive and user-friendly way to store valuable information and easily understand it. Now everyone can be looking at the same data.”
About Vantage Point Healthcare Information Systems, Inc.
Established in 1989 and based in Connecticut, Vantage Point Healthcare Information Systems has specialized in database, data warehouse and analytical software for nearly 15 years. Its premier product, SmartCare(R), is a combined healthcare data warehouse and analytical workbench which can be used onsite within an organization or run over the Internet.
To find out more about SmartCare and about Vantage Point, you may contact the company by visiting their website, http://www.vantagepointinc.com/
Contact
Larry Borok, at (860) 210-9049, or email to lborok@vantagepointinc.com.
Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20041110/NEW008AP PhotoExpress Network: PRN1PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.comVantage Point Healthcare Information Systems
CONTACT: Larry Borok of Vantage Point Healthcare Information Systems,+1-860-210-9049, lborok@vantagepointinc.com
Web site: http://www.vantagepointinc.com/