what we do industries

Health and Life Sciences

What’s going on?

Health care and all its related disciplines, including biomedical research, pharmaceuticals, and the growing fields of wellness and alternative medicine, are objects of impassioned national debate. The cost and quality of health care take center stage, given that the former is becoming staggering ($2.3 trillion in 2007, or a full 16% of the GDP), while the latter remains uncertain far too much of the time.

When it comes to the role of information technology in an industry, the stakes don’t get any higher, and the stakeholders don’t get more numerous, than they do in this one—the nation’s largest.

Health IT saves lives. It has been shown to ensure compliance with standard clinical guidelines, enable 24/7 disease surveillance, decrease medication and prescription errors, provide real time information in situations that are quite literally critical, and generate a higher incidence of successful patient outcomes. In fact, IT’s power to raise the quality of care makes it an essential criterion in pay-for-performance programs that payers are launching nationwide.

Health IT also saves money. Studies have proven that heath information exchange and interoperability (HIEI) would provide a savings of $77.8 billion each year, which amounts to about 5% of annual US expenditures on health care. The US Department of Health and Human Services believes the savings would surpass $100 billion annually. Note that this figure represents only those savings from more efficient information sharing among health care providers; other health care IT applications would yield even further savings.

All health care stakeholders—providers, payers, patients, and the vast assortment of regional and national public and private organizations that create, study, evaluate, and fund health care programs—agree that information technology can significantly reduce costs while improving quality. Yet IT adoption in this industry lags behind all others, for many reasons: ownership, security, and privacy concerns; elusive ROI; profitability pressures; and incomplete, fluctuating technology standards are some of the barriers.

How can Clarity help?

Whatever the future of health care, at least one thing is clear: information technology will be part of the solution. Both federal and state legislation, coupled with public and private funding initiatives, are pushing IT adoption incentives, including hundreds of millions of dollars for providers and payers who build health information technology (HIT).

At Clarity, we can take the uncertainty about HIT and the reservations about its costs out of your organization’s internal debate.

To the country’s health providers, hospitals and other delivery organizations, researchers, product developers, and payers, Clarity brings the professionals and the skills to solve industry-specific problems like the following:

EMR/EHR adoption, evolution, and optimization

Your issue: Federal, medical community, and patient mandates that require electronic medical records (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) in a market flooded by first-generation, unproven, and uninteroperable EMR/EHR software.

Our answer:

A knowledgeable partner who can:

  • Evaluate your current workflow, identify critical steps and pain points, and guide you toward an EMR/EHR solution that fits the way your organization practices medicine.

    Clarity performs vendor-neutral current-state assessments and designs corresponding, tailored master plans through our Information Management Practice.
  • Modify and advance your EMR/EHR—whether it uses in-house software or an application service provider model—so that it:
    • Offers the features and functionality that you need, including computerized physician order entry (CPOE), notifications and alerts, and the ability to assess patient outcomes by select criteria.
    • Stays current with interoperability standards as policymakers, such as the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for HIT and the American Health Information Community (AHIC), establish them.
    Clarity develops, debugs, customizes, and tests software applications through our Application Development Practice.
  • Support your EMR/EHR with a data warehouse that integrates disparate sources of information to maintain up-to-date, quality patient, clinical, and pharmaceutical data.

    Clarity’s core business intelligence and data warehousing (BI/DW) expertise enables your organization to practice evidence-based medicine.

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The demand for patient-centric systems

Your issue: The shift from transaction-based systems to patient-based ones, driven by federal mandates to empower consumers with access to and control over their health information, and by the consumerist movement in other industries worldwide.

Our answer:

  • The wealth of customer information that you need to identify and segment your current and potential markets, and to design and pilot health plans and other health care products that meet market demands.

    Learn about Clarity’s Information Management Practice, which offers comprehensive customer data integration (CDI), and our specific customer relationship management (CRM) skills.
  • The application development and e-commerce skills to build a secure Web environment that customers can use to access health and insurance information, and that your organization can use to leverage the new retail healthcare landscape.

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Health data and system security, availability, and integrity

Your issue: The constant need to maintain security levels, ensure uptime, and protect data integrity in an environment that includes large numbers of diverse users, the strain of critical care, sensitive information, heavy regulatory requirements, and varied medical devices that rely on equally varied IT applications.

Our answer:

Advanced tools and technologies, through both our Application Development and Information Management Practices, for the following:

  • User authentication and authorization
  • Network and data security
  • Threat and patch management
  • Real time monitoring of system security and availability
  • Backup and recovery

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The proliferation of performance measures

Your issue: Collecting, isolating, and reporting health care quality and efficiency according to hundreds of performance measures defined by the industry.

Our answer:

Business intelligence solutions that combine complex analytics with precise data delivery, allowing you to aggregate the data elements you need for the measures that best promote care delivery at your organization, and that support your marketing initiatives.

Learn about Clarity’s business intelligence solutions.

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