Top five USA Healthcare provider needs to integrate device information from multiple data sources to have a 360° view of total cost of ownership and product performance in 600 locations nationwide.

As one of the largest health care organizations in the USA, we are constantly seeking solutions that can reduce the cost of care for our patients. We see semantic tehnology as mission critical to our future and the AllegroGraph semantic graph platform as a leading solution in the space.

– Program Director, Research and Innovation Clinical Technology, $45 billion managed health care organization

Their Goal

Aggregate multiple free text data fields (unstructured data) records for 500,000+ clinical devices

Their Challenges

  • The current device maintenance system of record is 20 years – with no naming conventions
  • Additionally records describing the specific devices are stored in a different database than the records for the service of
  • the devices however no information about cost or cost of ownership is included
  • There are ambiguities in the device naming of similar model devices
  • There are ambiguities in the device naming of similar model devices
  • Notes about the maintenance of specific devices are free form, unstructured text
  • There are publicly available sources of cost of purchase of devices

The Solution

  • Disambiguate service records

    From the structured field data in both systems, disambiguate service records with device detail records to connect medical device industry standard product codes (ECRI codes)

  • Entity extraction technology

    Utilizing Entity extraction technology from Franz’s partner SmartLogic Classification solution, the unstructured notes regarding the services preformed as well as free form comments we are able to find the most common, repeated services and repairs for specific makes and models of devices

  • Develop a Total Cost of Ownership

    Link initial cost and average cost to repair for the most common service items to develop a Total Cost of Ownership for device classes, specific models and specific devices.

The Benefits

  • New business value was created from two older legacy systems that were never built to provide the business insights for Total Cost of Ownership
  • No new workflow was created by the process, just new information
  • Facility planners are now able to make informed clinical device purchase decisions for their specific needs