Data for Quality and Process Improvement and Healthcare Operations

UC Davis Health is a leader in the deployment and use of a modern EHR product suite, having attained HIMSS Stage 7 recognition in 2012. Many high priority initiatives and opportunities require the ability to define and analyze cohorts or population data sets, something EHR software was not designed to do. Additionally, the need to integrate data created outside the electronic medical record is an important consideration for robust analytical models.

Nationally, large academic medical centers such as UC Davis Health struggle to consistently provide high quality data at scale and have thus been unable to meet institutional data access and analysis needs for the broad spectrum of stakeholders including clinical operations, quality and safety, and research. Over the past 15 years, a handful of health systems have made strategic investments in clinical informatics and enterprise data management that have enabled them to become leading learning healthcare systems. At most centers including UC Davis Health, however, data of varying or unknown quality remain isolated in disparate silos, and access to data is too inconsistent, inefficient, and disorganized to meet current and future strategic goals.  

IT Health Informatics is committed to supporting the data needs of our UC Davis Health partners involved in clinical operations, quality improvement, and process improvement activities. The department is organized around functions that support data

• Acquisition and Architecture: support and maintenance of EMR reporting databases and data warehouse, administration of tools and software (Tableau, Business Objects), acquisition and integration of non-EMR data.
• Curation: large scale aggregation and semantic curation of both raw and computed data fields, and the derivation of data assets including patient registries, complex clinical metrics, and outcome measures.
• Access and Delivery: data request intake and concierge services, provisioning of data sets and reports, training, and facilitating direct access to data through self-service tools.