At Lifechoice, information is seen as one of the most important resources an organisation has. In developing an information management strategy, we follow a process of auditing the organisations current information management practices to develop and implement an information management strategy that supports the organisation’s strategy and key business units.

Lifechoice prides itself on its ability to develop state of the art data warehouses for the structuring of large volumes of information. With our extensive experience in informatics and knowledge of the health industry, we are able to build (and have built) health data warehouses for healthcare organisations, including medical schemes, managed care companies and provider groups.

The data team at Lifechoice has creating reporting tools that produce standard reports. These reports provide our clients with structured information regarding trend analysis, year on year comparisons and benchmark comparisons. The reports offer clean and meaningful information to management, trustees and directors to improve the performance of the organisation and contacted third parties.

Profiling is a key aspect of our performance management models and is linked into our reporting tools. We are able to extract data from client databases to generate reports and populate models that show the performance of providers and patient trends. The application of our internally developed Diagnosis Related Grouper (DRG) that allows for the case mix comparison between hospital groups and providers comes standard with our hospital risk management and specialist management reports.

A key Lifechoice competency is to provide the processes and tools required to empower a change in the interaction and contracting between funders and providers of healthcare. These tools are aimed at evaluating and quantifying the value delivered by healthcare providers as opposed to managing the volume of services delivered. Tools such as the Lifechoice DRG and Provider Practice Profiling methodologies inevitably change the structure of contracting to reward appropriate clinical and financial outcomes for funders, healthcare providers and patients.

Big data presents healthcare orientated companies with an opportunity to fundamentally change the nature of the engagement with its clients. Healthcare management, in particular, is an area that is information driven and industry participants have utilised the Lifechoice IT capability to assist the development and implementation of their strategies.