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ProHealth Care Drives Population Health Management through Epic’s Cogito Data Warehouse

Perficient improves ProHealth Care’s data architecture, implements data warehouse that delivers actionable, integrated and real-time clinical insights; ProHealth Care is the first healthcare system to produce reports and data out of Epic’s Cogito data warehouse in production environment 

SAINT LOUIS (March 24, 2014)Health data has become a powerful influencer in population health management as healthcare organizations strive to analyze data and translate it into actionable, real-time insights, leading to smarter business decisions and better care for patients. Challenged by the increasing complexity of managing an influx of health data from various sources including electronic medical records (EMRs), claims, billing transactions and patient histories, ProHealth Care, a not-for-profit, community-based health care system, sought to drive their data architecture efforts to better manage population health. The company partnered with Perficient, Inc. (NASDAQ: PRFT), a leading information technology consulting firm serving Global 2000 and other large enterprise customers, to implement Epic System’s Cogito data warehouse to improve data collection, measurement and analysis, and delivery of data.

As the largest healthcare provider in Waukesha County in southeast Wisconsin, ProHealth Care has 15 primary care clinics, three hospitals, home health care, inpatient and home hospice services, long-term care, senior residency communities, and a health and fitness center. It offers a network of nearly 1,000 physicians and 4,800 employees. As a healthcare system, ProHealth Care was challenged with easily finding and capturing health information across its entire network. In addition, ProHealth Care has seen a rapid growth in EMRs and other data sources, and its accountable care organization (ACO), ProHealth Solutions, also needed to implement a series of new metrics and reports to meet ACO pay-for-performance requirements.

“As the healthcare industry remains under pressure from reform efforts, increased competition, and evolving patient demands, it has become imperative for healthcare companies to access and analyze health data in real-time in order to provide quality patient care and maintain the financial health of the organization,” said Martin Sizemore, principal, healthcare strategic advisory services for Perficient’s national healthcare business practice. “By implementing Epic’s Cogito data warehouse, ProHealth Care was able to better meet growing data and reporting needs, and provide its health system with a central data repository for clinical, financial and business data.”

Perficient engaged with ProHealth Care to drive their data architecture efforts, working with them on the integration of Epic System’s Cogito data warehouse and several other key sources surfacing data via Microsoft SQL Server. ProHealth Care and Perficient first performed a business intelligence assessment and created a BI roadmap, utilizing Microsoft’s BI stack. Following this assessment, ProHealth Care chose Cogito as the foundation for its data warehouse model in order to meet the growing data and reporting needs and accelerate the development process. Perficient and ProHealth Care also extended the core capability of the Cogito data warehouse to meet the detailed needs of ACO requirements, and ProHealth Care focused on getting a series of ACO measures in place and identified several domains on which to focus and improve patient care and healthcare delivery.

ProHealth Care was the first healthcare system to produce reports and data out of Epic’s Cogito data warehouse in a production environment. As a result of its implementation, ProHealth Care created a data warehouse that integrates and streamlines data across silos. In addition, the data warehouse is now being used to create physician profiles, a physician-friendly interface that allows providers to see which patients are in need of important health screenings or care interventions. The implementation of the Cogito data warehouse also has enabled ProHealth Care to deliver clinically-integrated insights and real-time business intelligence to better manage overall population health. It has set the stage for enhanced preventive care and improved management of chronic diseases, ultimately resulting in better clinical outcomes and improved population health.

“At ProHealth Care we were challenged with immense amounts of data coming from various systems and sources. We not only needed to integrate our systems to manage this data, but we needed to make the data actionable,” said Christine Bessler, CIO, ProHealth Care. “In working with Perficient, ProHealth has become the first healthcare system to successfully implement Epic’s Cogito data warehouse and produce reports in a meaningful way. Our organization now has the tools and processes in place to better manage population health data, giving physicians access to information in real-time, setting the stage for preventive care and improving overall patient care and the health of our population.”

Learn More about ProHealth Care’s Road to Improved Population Health Management
Perficient, Microsoft’s 2013 U.S. Partner of the Year, will host the webinar, “Learn How ProHealth Care is Innovating Population Health Management with Clinically Integrated Insights” on Wednesday, March 26 at 1 p.m. CT. During the webinar, ProHealth Care’s Bessler will discuss how through the Cogito data warehouse implementation, the healthcare system has delivered clinically integrated insights to 460 physicians, how access to analytics allows their physicians to easily see which patients need important health screenings or interventions, and the company’s strategy for integrating data from Epic with information from other EMRs and data sources. In addition, Perficient’s Director of Healthcare Advisory Services Juliet Silver will provide insight into the methodology applied at ProHealth Care to establish data governance as a discipline, and operationalize the business intelligence competency center. Click here to register for the webinar.

Learn more about Perficient’s expertise in the healthcare industry and Microsoft technologies. Follow the team online via the Perficient Microsoft Community blog, the Perficient Health IT blog, or via Twitter @Perficient_MSFT and @Perficient_HC.

About Perficient
Perficient is a leading information technology consulting firm serving Global 2000® and enterprise customers throughout North America. Perficient’s professionals serve clients from a network of offices across North America and three offshore locations, in Eastern Europe, India, and China. Perficient helps clients use Internet-based technologies to improve productivity and competitiveness, strengthen relationships with customers, suppliers and partners, and reduce information technology costs. Perficient, traded on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, is a member of the Russell 2000® index and the S&P SmallCap 600 index. Perficient is an award-winning “Premier Level” IBM business partner, a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold Certified Partner, an Oracle Platinum Partner, a Gold Salesforce.com Cloud Alliance Partner, a TeamTIBCO partner, and an EMC Select Services Team Partner. For more information, please visit www.perficient.com.

About ProHealth Care
For a century, ProHealth Care has been the health care leader in Waukesha County and surrounding areas, providing outstanding care across a full spectrum of services. The people of ProHealth Care strive to continuously improve the health and well-being of the community by combining skill, compassion and innovation. The ProHealth family includes Waukesha Memorial Hospital, Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital, the Rehabilitation Hospital of Wisconsin, ProHealth Care Medical Associates clinics, Moreland Surgery Center, AngelsGrace Hospice, ProHealth Home Care and Hospice, West Wood Health & Fitness Center and Regency Senior Communities. Learn more at www.ProHealthCare.org.

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