2007 Best Practices Award Winner: Memorial Sloan-Kettering

A committee defined a methodology to create, maintain, and administer a data warehouse that would ultimately unite clinical, operational, and financial data.

Category: Government and Non-Profit

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) is one of the premier cancer centers in the world, committed for over a century to exceptional patient care, leading-edge research, and superb educational programs. The Center has nearly 9,000 employees.  In 2006, more than 21,000 patients were admitted to Memorial Hospital and MSKCC accommodated over 430,000 outpatient visits.

The MSKCC’s data warehouse, the Institutional DataBase (IDB), was launched in 1988 when the Information Systems senior management team formed a steering committee from Hospital Administration, Quality Assurance, Information Systems, and the Clinical community. This committee defined a methodology to create, maintain, and administer a data warehouse that would ultimately unite clinical, operational, and financial data. The IDB has evolved well beyond its original objective to make institutional data readily available for research, decision support, and executive information systems.

Business Impact
Treatment of patients: IDB data provides clinicians with a patient’s history of chemotherapy; it also helps clinicians study and compare the effectiveness of treatment regimens.

Research: Information Systems’ data delivery group DataLine has provided thousands of reports to support cancer research initiatives, leading to active protocols and published papers. The group has also provided key information in the generation of tens of millions of dollars in institutional grants.

Hospital Operations:

• The IDB is the primary data source for “visit processing,” which supports the coding of ~$1 billion in annual ambulatory revenue.
• IDB reports have been created to help support accreditation from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO).
• Census information from the IDB supports budgetary decisions by MSKCC management.

Maturity
In 1989, the IDB consisted of two subject areas. Today, 16 disparate applications with various DBMSs feed the IDB to produce more than 1,000 daily reports.  In place since IDB’s inception are “morning reports” for each subject area, which are monitored daily in order to identify data anomalies, growth and exception conditions.

In the early 1990s a data delivery team called “DataLine” was created. Starting with one data expert, the group has grown to six, and develops more than 500 ad hoc and scheduled reports per year.  Power users also provide data delivery services and run reports out of the IDB for 10 departments, accounting for thousands of reports per year.