Meet Our Health Informatics Team

  • David Smith, PhD

    Senior Data Scientist

  • Erik Garbacik, PhD

    Principal Data Scientist

Health Informatics

Peregrine seamlessly generates and integrates data-driven insights to optimize healthcare outcomes and operational efficiency, thereby empowering diverse clients with cutting-edge data solutions.

Peregrine is currently producing a strategy and implementation plan for an integrated, cloud-based, data-driven healthcare informatics platform to support service providers and patients.

Peregrine is developing this platform to create targeted solutions for democratizing access to data on the cost of health procedures by geography, provider, and other key industry variables. The solutions will incorporate descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive analytical methods to empower decision-making.

Services

  • ∞ Policy: We conduct policy analyses to evaluate and optimize regulatory impacts on business workflows and patient service delivery.

    ∞ Workflow: We evaluate operational workflow to identify possible efficiency gains.

    ∞ Safety: We analyze patient safety and clinical safety processes to mitigate patient risks.

    ∞ Applied Analytics: We create tools for ongoing and ad hoc analyses that can be regularly applied to business and operational processes and patient support.

  • ∞ Systems Engineering: We develop and maintain technical and data infrastructure and systems.

    ∞ Testing: We evaluate engineering solutions’ fitness for purpose and quality of outputs through rigorous testing.

    ∞ Simulation: We forecast systems engineering impacts and effectiveness through rigorous simulation of production implementations.

    ∞ Solutions Engineering: We solve key business problems through effective solutions engineering.

    ∞ Information Security: We safeguard patient and operational data through the implementation of technology and processes to proactively mitigate information security risks.

  • ∞ Standards: We develop and implement enterprise-wide data governance policies and standards to manage data access and use while protecting sensitive data according to legal requirements such as HIPAA and industry best practices.

    ∞ Interoperability: We define and implement data systems and structures to create interoperability between an organization’s various data offerings, accelerating the velocity of data.

    ∞ Risk Management: We proactively identify risk factors in technology, data structures, and data processes for risk management or mitigation, and develop data-oriented crisis management policies and procedures.

  • ∞ Operations: We coordinate operations support to address strategic and on-the-ground client requirements.

    ∞ Field Usability: We package solutions and tools in user-friendly formats to promote usability in the field.

    ∞ Field Support: We engage stakeholders to provide effective support to the field.

    ∞ Issue Management & Resolution: We elicit and resolve client issues by operating consistent and effective communication, project management tools, and issue trackers.

    ∞ Quality Management: We conduct ongoing evaluations of development processes, tools, and systems to implement effective quality control.

    ∞ Continuous Improvement: We align stakeholder feedback, strategic visions, and Agile development cycles to continuously improve upon tools and technologies.

  • ∞ Workflow & Process Engineering: We perform workflow and process engineering to optimize client operations.

    ∞ Change Management: We support organizational transitions with active stakeholder engagement to align client operations to their strategic goals.

    ∞ Change Control: We leverage change control procedures and methodologies to coordinate effective transitions of IT environments.

  • ∞ Decision Support: We develop and implement systems to support clinical decision-making through data-driven insights.

    ∞ Patient Safety: We design analytical systems and processes to achieve patient safety by identifying patterns that indicate potential safety issues.

    ∞ Clinical Workflow: We support optimization of clinical workflows by providing insights into operating structures.

  • ∞ Instructional System Design: We design effective, enterprise-focused training calibrated to critical user personas.

    ∞ Coursework: We provide effective training across key topics such as data strategy, governance, and data lifecycle stages, with an emphasis on continual learning.

Case Study

Health insurance providers are required by Executive Order and a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule to make their pricing publicly available to promote transparency. However, providers release their data in structures and formats that are inaccessible to the general public and have significant technical barriers to use even for specialized private entities.

Peregrine is working to remove these barriers to use by developing an integrated, cloud-based solutions framework. This framework will process the raw insurance provider data into more accessible, revealing, and insightful structures. A value-add data analytics layer will additionally enable action-oriented healthcare industry professionals to better shape care outcomes and improve patient centricity within practice management. Our efforts demonstrate how data innovation with our systems, tools, and processes improve accessibility and meaningful change.

  • Health insurance providers publish their pricing data in formats that are inaccessible to the general public and have significant barriers to use even for specialized private entities.

    Multiple core problems in working with the data exist, such as:

    ∞ Data is difficult for an interested end user to access because of its file structure (20+ gigabyte JSON, CSV, and XML files);

    ∞ Data is difficult to parse because it is provided at an extremely granular level with a convoluted hierarchy of labels; and,

    ∞ Full perspective requires combining insurance provider data with negotiated rates data.

  • Peregrine is working to remove the barriers to using health insurance providers’ pricing data by developing an integrated, cloud-based solutions framework to process the raw insurance provider data into more accessible structures.

    Peregrine’s solution experts were able to:

    ∞ Address the core technical challenges of data access by building tools to extract the provided data, transform the data into more easily understandable and accessible structures, and load these structures into database systems for easy querying;

    ∞ Develop an automated, AWS cloud-based production environment to continue processing this data on an ongoing basis;

    ∞ Develop a secure interface to allow for easy end user querying of the data for common requests such as the cost of a procedure by insurance provider by zip code;

    ∞ Develop a subscription-based secure API for programmatic access to the data for bulk querying purposes or advanced analytics; and,

    ∞ Create a value-add data services hub to leverage analytics algorithms and artificial intelligence for supporting real-time care decisions through improved insights.

  • Peregrine’s solution demonstrates that the use of our systems, tools, and processes improves accessibility to health insurance provider data. We are building towards a productionalized, integrated, cloud-based system to deliver an effective, value-add data solution to a broader base of healthcare information consumers.