EHR Unstructured Data Mining

This morning, Shahid Shah over at the The Healthcare IT Guy blog, published an article outlining why medical device data is the best way to fill meaningful use EHRs and conduct comparative effectiveness research (CER). What was of particular interest to me is the way in which Shahid elegantly broke down how unstructured and structured data is “sourced” today (scroll down in the blog article for the graphic).

As is evident by the table above, many of the existing MU incentives in Phase 1 (patient reported and healthcare professional entered especially) promote the wrong kinds of collection: unreliable, slow, and error prone. Accurate, real-time, data is only available from connected medical devices and labs / diagnostics equipment.

Given that meaningful Use and CER advocates are promoting (structured) data collection for reduction of medical errors, analysis of treatments and procedures, and research for new methods it’s important to see that we’re not going to get real gains until the medical device vendors are fully connected and providing data directly into EHRs or clinical data warehouses.