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Easing The Transfer Of Data
August 1, 2008
When managed care organizations receive electronic data from a third party, they usually have two options for how they can integrate it into their core systems. They can build a custom interface to transfer the data. Or they can transfer the information manually by cutting and pasting each field of data into the new application.
Some larger payers internally develop complex, one-time interfaces. But smaller payers, including Health Partners, a Philadelphia-based, not-for-profit company offering a Medicaid HMO, lack the I.T. resources to tackle such difficult projects.
Each time Health Partners receives a third-party data feed, it has to decide whether it wants to outsource development of an interface to its managed care information system—from DST Health Solutions, Birmingham, Ala.—or have staff in its various business units tediously cut and paste the data, says Hal Augustine, CIO.
While custom programming can be expensive, Health Partners staff members also can only handle a limited amount of manual data transfer work, he adds.
“Most of the manual work we do is for a lower volume data transfer,” he says. “We can transfer a few hundred data codes on our own, but not a few hundred thousand. Everyone still has a daytime job they have to do.” So when the payer received electronic supplemental insurance information from the state’s department of public welfare for its members that would require the transfer of 201,688 lines of data into its core system, it decided to research other alternatives.
In February 2007, Health Partners—which is owned by seven Philadelphia-area delivery systems that run a combined 38 hospitals—purchased technology from Winter Park, Fla.-based EnableSoft Inc. to communicate with and transfer data between applications.
The vendor’s FoxtrotOne system enables users to create “scripts” that tell it which data to scrape from one application and where to put it in the other. Then users instruct the system when to initiate the transfer. The technology can be used with any Microsoft Windows or browser-based application and can be programmed to run multiple data transfers simultaneously or consecutively.
So far, Health Partners has used the new technology to transfer the supplemental insurance data into its core system, as well as for three other large data integration projects. The payer was able to justify purchasing the system because it cost less than what it had projected to spend on building the interfaces for those projects, Augustine says.
The Medicaid HMO also has used the system for some small data cleansing projects and will to use it to transfer physician specialty code reference tables from its core system into a new care management system it’s implementing from McKesson Corp., San Francisco. “The system paid for itself in the first two projects we did with it,” Augustine says.
Slow Uptake
Many health care organizations have been slow to adopt systems that enable the creation of multiple data transfer initiatives because the technology is relatively new compared with point-to-point interfaces or standards-based interface engines, says Tom Foley, principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, New York.
Some organizations spent the past 10 years just learning how to acquire data from various sources, so these types of tools are more necessary now, he adds. But over the past few years, reusable data transfer technology has matured. And both payers and providers are becoming more comfortable with implementing it and training their staff to use it, Foley says.
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