Data from the Deep Web Accelerates Healthcare IT Adoption

Health IT adoption is a hot topic in healthcare. Many healthcare providers are fighting the uphill battle to select and implement new technology.

BrightPlanet partnered with The Rockville Institute for the Advancement of Social Science and Westat to provide the data collection behind the HealthITxChange, a free, online collaborative community designed to accelerate the successful adoption of health information technology by medical practices throughout the United States.

The HealthITxChange, which will be launched at HIMSS, enables health IT professionals to share unbiased resources, lessons learned, and best practices for overcoming real-world problems encountered during the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs). The HealthITxChange allows members of the health IT community to exchange information about their experiences in implementing EHR systems that medical practices can use to achieve meaningful use goals, meet health information exchange requirements, and improve health care services.

Harvesting Deep Web Content into 1,600 Unique Result Sets

BrightPlanet was tasked with setting up the data collection for the HealthITxChange. BrightPlanet’s harvested data from over 50 Health/IT-related web sources. The harvested data was sorted into approximately 1,600 unique result sets to deliver relevant content to the end user. Some examples of harvested content include recent YouTube videos, journal articles, government sites, and health news articles.

HITXC_ontologyThe HealthITxChange community is organized by stages of EHR implementation (see image to the right). After selecting a stage of implementation, visitors can drill-down from four categories (Peoples, Process, Technology, Other) into 71 unique sub-categories for each of the seven stages.

Each layer of the HealthITxChange ontology corresponds with one BrightPlanet query into Deep Web EHR-related data. Each query is designed to pull back results specific for that specific subcategory. BrightPlanet is harvesting new content daily from over 50 Health/IT websites, so results update continuously.

Example: Just 1 of 1,600 Unique Result Sets

The user follows the ontology “Preparing”  >  “Other”  >  “Intro to EHRs”  >  “Myths”. Within the “Myths” sub-category, clicking on the Links tab pulls up all harvested content from Health/IT web sources relating to EHRs and myths. The query entered by BrightPlanet to harvest results for this specific sub-category is  (“EHR Myths”~3 OR “EMR Myths”~3). This query returns all documents with (EMR or EHR) and “myths” within three words or less of each other. BrightPlanet harvests new content daily from each of the over 50 Health/IT sources; so if any new documents satisfy the query (“EHR Myths”~3 OR “EMR Myths”~3), those documents will update in the “Myths” sub-category.

Myths

No IT Requirements for Hosting Data

BrightPlanet’s service includes both harvesting and data storage requiring minimal involvement from Westat’s IT. As a result, Westat didn’t need to invest additional IT resources to implement 1,600 unique collections of EHR-related web content into HealthITxChange.

Other Ways to Simplify Health Research with the Deep Web

Download BrightPlanet’s free whitepaper on harnessing the Deep Web for healthcare research, to see other ways data from the Deep Web and technology from BrightPlanet can be used to improve healthcare research.

Free HealthITxChange membership is available for all individuals and organizations interested in EHRs. To learn more about the HealthITxChange and find out how your organization can get involved, contact Helga Rippen ([email protected], 240-453-2622), or visit www.HealthITxChange.org.




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