Texas Health Resources

Transforming health care for 7 million patients through the power of data.

Texas Health Resources

The United States healthcare industry is one of the largest and most complex health systems in the world. Healthcare spending is forecasted to reach $5.3 trillion in 2025, according to National Health Expenditure Data published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

With a landscape of private and public payers, established and emerging providers and retail clinics, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and distributors, it’s no surprise there is a growing demand for broader ecosystem services that improve patient interactions across their health care journey. Emerging trends like Population Health Management (PHM) and personalized care rely on data to identify patient needs and health services necessary to improve the health of the nation.

Texas Health Resources (THR) is a faith-based, nonprofit health system whose mission is “to improve the health of the people in the communities (they) serve.” Serving 7M people in North Texas, THR health care includes Texas Health Physicians Group, hospitals, outpatient facilities, neighborhood care and wellness centers, home health, as well as preventative and fitness services. They provide the full continuum of care for all stages of life.

THR treats data as their greatest asset by taking an enterprise-focused, integrated approach to their data meeting patients where they are in their healthcare journey. They are transforming the patient experience and the lives of the people in the communities they serve through the power of data.

Connected identity creates a path to Patient 360.

Over 350 access points allow patients to interact with and receive care from Texas Health Resources.

These access points include:
  • 27 hospitals

  • 80 outpatient facilities, surgery centers, behavioral health facilities, fitness centers, and imaging centers

  • 250 community access points including clinics and doctors’ offices

The variety of patient access points means many source systems capable of creating new patient records. Additionally, clinicians, physicians, nurses, and staff need access to the data to make decisions, but also enrich the data based on their patient interactions.

Data subject areas include:
  • Patient experience (i.e. patient satisfaction)

  • Texas Health Physician Group comments (i.e. nurse or doctor notes, billing issues)

  • Clinical documentation (i.e. port cleaning, bandage changes)

  • Patient behavioral health

  • Call center operations

  • Digital, web, and mobile

  • Patient safety

  • Pharmacy data

  • Cardiovascular

  • COVID-19 cross-functional teams (i.e. supplies inventory, patients, staffing, testing centers)

Texas Health Resources by the numbers

$5B
operating revenue
6,200
physicians
4,000
licenses hospital beds
23,000
employees

When data is isolated, it becomes fragmented and siloed, leading to data accessibility challenges and uncertainty due to incomplete data.

When teams are left to make decisions on incomplete data, patient experience suffers and negatively impacts overall patient health.

“We wanted to look at it from a ‘connected identity’ perspective to say ‘How often is somebody actually touching us? How are we connecting with that person as a patient, and really helping them with their health?’,” said Michael Parris, Chief Data Officer and VP of Analytics at Texas Health Resources.  

At the start, THR couldn’t bring patient identities together to encourage the desired patient behaviors.

“We couldn't connect a Texas Health Physicians Group visit to one of our joint ventures, and back to one of our hospitals. From an overall healthcare system, we couldn't say, ‘Hey, you know what? Everybody is hitting urgent care, then they're going to our emergency department, then they're going to an outpatient service, and then they're coming back to the hospital and staying for three days.’ Parris continued, “we could never connect that together as a whole.”

The team sought to identify a single record of truth for patients.

For example, when Carol Smith is the same person as Carol Jane Smith, THR adds additional data to enrich the identity, such as verifying addresses and reviewing timestamps of updates to identity data.

“We take identities from all the source systems and add all the systems that have additional attributes and information to consolidate identities. These are the things we’re building into our Patient 360, which allows downstream systems, from that moment forward, to be fed by the single view of a person,” shared Parris.

An enterprise focus integrates data across the business and multiple source systems, allowing THR to drive deeper insights to improve patient experience and health outcomes.

The Teradata data warehouse has grown from 12 source systems in 2018, to 24 in 2019, and now 43 in 2020. THR is now bringing data in from their ERP, finance, several joint ventures, and HR. Bringing in these additional data elements allows the team to have a richer, connected Patient 360 dataset.

Parris credited “Teradata and its ability for us to utilize and bring in the interaction data and using Teradata’s strength of parallel processing to merge all these sources.”

With a Connected Identity and Patient 360 solution in place, the Teradata data warehouse contains Master Provider Data, creating opportunities to better recognize individuals, tailor messages, and improve their level of care. Integrating patient care touchpoints across multiple systems means THR is able to connect doctor’s visits, to outpatient surgeries, to rehabilitation care, to pharmacies for prescriptions, to imaging centers. The result is a connected patient care journey, where THR uses data to support patients and lead to improved patient outcomes.

Creating opportunities to better recognize individuals, tailor messages, and improve their level of care

“Patient 360 and Connected Identity helps us to really understand how people are moving through our system. When they fall out of our system, how do we bring them actually back in? Bringing the identity together gives us that opportunity to nudge you in the right direction for improving your health.”

Michael Parris, Chief Data Officer and VP of Analytics 

Patient 360 transforms health outcomes.

Patient 360 data allows THR to use population data to then communicate, care, and treat its more than 5M patients, looking to positively impact the patient health of its communities. The result is a healthcare system with a care journey that patients feel is tailored to their individual behaviors and needs while maximizing health across the population. Additionally, this integration and access to data across the enterprise has opened up possibilities for teams within the system to improve quality of care.

Parris shared multiple examples where Patient 360 supports their mission of improving the health of their communities:

  1. 1. Encouraging desired patient behaviors through personalized messages

“When you're looking at a single patient, you can make a decision. With Patient 360, you look at a patient population and make decisions for individual patients ahead of time, before you see them. We can create something specific and tailor that message to that one individual because we understand what the entire population is doing. The only way you can really understand how to move population health is if you have every identity organized, every person organized, so that you can slice and dice the population in the fastest, quickest manner.”

  1. 2. Connecting emergency department visits to long-term benefits

“We look at a mobile application to reduce returns to the emergency department and Patient 360 allowed us to quickly see the downstream effect six months after an emergency department visit. Without Patient 360, we would’ve felt like we weren’t reducing emergency visits and so our tactics weren’t working. Where-as, our tactics actually had long-term benefits of patients being more connected with Texas Health.”

3. Integrating health care interactions for a complete picture of patient journeys
“For people who have a heart procedure we trace back and see, what their journey was through our system. Where did similar individuals possibly fall out? Where did they stay? On average, how long did it take to go from first visit to heart procedure, and how many steps along the way? These are big visibility improvements, because typically you can't easily piece together what is happening to somebody since most of health care is treated on the particular emergency visit or particular doctor visit. Now we can show that full picture at an individual and a group level.”

4. Geocoding patient proximity to access points

“With everyone in our Patient 360, we’ve geocoded addresses to determine the first, second, and third closest clinic; the same for urgent cares; the closest hospital; and so on. So, we have all this information prebuilt into our dataset, making our marketing function so much faster and easier, because those don't have to be calculated each time they're featured.”

5. Balancing hospital preference and proximity based on specialized care
“For obstetrics care, we’ve found you might have a slight preference on a hospital, but how close you are to something makes a lot more difference than hospital preference, especially if both hospitals are rated similarly. We know that if you’re outside of a 20-or 30-minute drive, you're probably not going to go out of your way. This gives an idea of how we should actually customize our interactions with you. You're in a larger segmentation group, but you add factor on top of factor, on top of factor, and you can get to a very customized message for each person.”

THR is now turning to Vantage Customer Experience and Celebrus to connect the digital patient journey and tailor messages, leading to real-time virtualized care with next-best-actions. The virtualized care will expand the area THR may cover, improving access and experience of care.

“Depending on whether you come to us from the website, MyChart app, call center, or one of our access points (like the emergency department, hospital, outpatient service, imaging or urgent care), we know who your identity is, and we can figure out the next best action for you. We can help you have a better patient experience,” proclaimed Parris.

Democratizing data: Teradata Vantage enables self-service analytics, even during a pandemic.

Demonstrating patient outcomes through data has seen THR transform into a data-driven enterprise. Enterprises of the future bring together and analyze all available data to report on what happened with descriptive analytics, and combine descriptive with predictive and prescriptive analytics to project what will happen and take action. THR is moving from targeting large segments of patients to targeting single patients with personalized messages, offers, and actions. This demands a future-ready data analytics platform that makes these capabilities possible. Where data flows through the organization and the entire enterprise derives value and insights from data.

Parris credits an integrated, managed, secure, and scalable platform in Teradata as a key enabler to their COVID-19 response. According to Parris, “with COVID, we were able to put together a dashboard in less than a week and a half. It includes clinical activity in our hospitals, testing for asymptomatic patients, supplies like masks and caps and gowns, testing strip supplies, ICU capacity, and staff out with COVID quarantine issues.

We’ve connected all that data into one Teradata environment and allow secure, managed access. Now, executives can go to one centralized dashboard to see everything that’s important rather than six or seven different groups.”

“It's really accelerated our ability to use analytics across organizations,” Parris continued.

Data Labs within Teradata Vantage allows THR to support self-service analytics, making it easy for users to develop new insights in data by allocating space in the environment for users to easily access production information without moving or replicating data. The Teradata data analytics platform maximizes resources, streamlines processes, and delivers fast and accurate answers. 

Parris described the data analytics workflow, “through data labs in Teradata, we give people access, or little chunks of our enterprise data warehouse, allowing them to connect directly back to our main data warehouse, build whatever goodness they want for their department in an Alteryx workflow, and then publish it out to a Tableau dashboard. My team is orchestrating this through a data governance process. It has helped streamline work important to analytic teams outside my area, leaving my teams time to focus.”

However, for highly regulated industries like healthcare, setting permissions to accessible data is highly nuanced. Security controls in Teradata Vantage allows standing up data labs that make data available based on roles, access requirements, and needs of the users.

“The built-in security functions in Teradata to support secure, well-managed, and governed data labs is incredibly important. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to set up open access and self-service. Someone might have access to clinical data, but they can’t have access to behavioral health data. Or, they can’t have access to HIV positive data. This is where we can begin to control access at a very granular data and personnel level,” explained Parris.

By equipping the organization with self-service analytics, Parris and his team are now free to build up a data science center of excellence. The team is now able to build more marketing models, propensity models, and recommendation engines that will fill in gaps and improve patient experience. As demonstrated at THR, treating data as their greatest asset and becoming an enterprise of the future is leading to positive results with a seamless customer experience, real-time service personalization, and frictionless channel integration.

Texas Health Resources is transforming how they work and the health of the people they serve through the power of data—Teradata makes it possible.

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