Background

Pinnacle Incorporated is the parent in a group of specialist primary healthcare organisations, including Pinnacle Midlands Health Network and Ventures. The Pinnacle network has over 85 general medical practice teams across the midlands region of the North Island, New Zealand. Pinnacle’s focus is the provision of thriving primary and community healthcare services across the region.

The Problem

Pinnacle needed a secure way to move sensitive primary healthcare data from the medical practice Patient Management Systems (PMS) to a data lake for analytics. The data is used to help manage the population’s health and to assist with government performance reporting. Data insights are also needed to identify areas of performance improvement between Pinnacle and its patients.

Any new data transfer process needed to be transparent for medical practices and clearly state what was being collected, and when. Previous solutions that Pinnacle had tried or looked at hadn’t offered practices any visibility over what information was being transferred.

Eightwire’s robust data transfer service helped reassure practices coming on board with this solution. Trust was quickly gained by understanding how Eightwire delivers its data and ensures its secure transmission. With privacy and security by design, Eightwire could deliver a secure yet transparent channel for information across the health sector.

The Approach

Pinnacle needed an automated data delivery service for providing better reporting and delivering better insights. All the while, security, privacy and transparency were paramount.

With Eightwire’s secure system connectors, Pinnacle was able to connect to on-premise and cloud data stores in a few hours. The initial pilot saw five medical practice PMSs connected. The agreed data was collected from the PMSs, and delivered easily and securely to Pinnacle’s data lake. To prevent data leakage, data was encrypted in transit and at rest, with only the data owner and end user authorised to view and use the data. Importantly, Pinnacle and the practices were in control of the data at all times – they knew where the data was stored and maintained at each step of the data delivery process.

The Benefits

Pinnacle was able to easily onboard medical practice PMSs across its network. Eightwire’s Data Delivery Service allowed secure transport of key primary healthcare data back to Pinnacle. It was used for business and performance improvement, and mandatory reporting to funders such as government health departments. Near real-time, reliable data reporting can help make a real impact in healthcare decision making.

Pinnacle manages 87 medical practices and is undertaking a programme to use Eightwire for all non-cloud PMSs. Pinnacle enjoys the reassurance of the Eightwire service that monitors the connections and the data structures, reporting any issues automatically, while continuing to transfer data. This means that healthcare reporting and analytics can continue to be performed while any alerts are investigated.

Following this successful pilot, Pinnacle are looking at other opportunities to leverage the power of Eightwire across their network and other data-driven initiatives.

Other opportunities include:

• the Healthcare Home Collaborative national data service, which collates patient-level data from Collaborative members for benchmarking and improvement
• providing performance data to ACC under the new high-tech imaging initiative.

“Eightwire has solved a significant problem for us – we can now provide transparency and accountability to our members around the data that is being moved. In addition, it is a neutral data solution that links together every system in the healthcare sector to government agencies.”

John Macaskill-Smith
CEO, Ventures (Pinnacle Group)

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