Introduction
Application developers and solution partners often need to process healthcare data outside of the electronic medical record (EMR) system. EMRs are primarily designed to directly support individual patient care, with a focus on clinical documentation, regulatory compliance, and billing. When applications require more intensive analytics, large-scale data aggregation, or real-time processing, however, performance constraints and inherent data silos can turn EMRs into processing bottlenecks. In addition, EMRs often limit their application programming interfaces (APIs) to be read-only, making it impossible for developers to store genomic, medical device, and other kinds of more technical data, which are the backbone of innovative healthcare applications. Most EMRs were not designed to support such uses.
By leveraging a separate clinical data repository (CDR), solution partners can overcome these limitations and gain greater flexibility, to employ advanced analytics, predictive modeling, population health management, and clinical decision support. All of these typically lie beyond the capabilities of an EMR. Processing data outside the EMR also allows for more seamless integration across multiple systems and data sources.
Healthcare data often comes from diverse sources—multiple EMRs, labs, imaging systems, and even wearable devices. Integrating this data into a single repository enables solution partners to build applications that give a holistic view of patient information, enhancing clinical insights and improving care coordination. This approach also supports compliance with healthcare standards, such as HL7 FHIR, that facilitate data exchange across disparate systems. Ultimately, by using a dedicated CDR outside the EMR, application developers gain a robust, high-performance platform for building data-driven healthcare solutions that are scalable, interoperable, and capable of supporting modern artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools.
While the focus of the EMR is individual patients and their care and histories, the purposes of a CDR are often more disparate. A CDR can serve to house data not intended for an EMR or data that requires fast access, often for analytical purposes. The creation of a separate repository allows the EMR and the CDR to efficiently serve their respective distinct purposes, complementing each other’s functions, without interfering with each other.
Download the white paper to learn more, including:
- Why an Independent Clinical Data Repository?
- Reducing Hospital Readmissions: A CDR Example
- Population Health with Aggregated Clinical Data
- InterSystems IRIS for Health: An Ideal Platform for a CDR
- Health Analytics with InterSystems: Analyze Data Your Way
- Build Your Own CDR with InterSystems